


Pox Dagura

by Barkour



Series: Flash of Lightning, Break of Thunder [1]
Category: How to Train Your Dragon (Movies)
Genre: Between Seasons/Series, Body Horror, Gen, Mixed Canon, Unresolved Romantic Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-22
Updated: 2017-11-22
Packaged: 2019-02-05 08:29:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 62,033
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12790680
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Barkour/pseuds/Barkour
Summary: When Hiccup is abducted by an old rival, Toothless and Astrid must lead a rescue team to find him. Hiccup must make tough choices in captivity, and Astrid is faced with a sort of personal reckoning.(After the first film, takes some cues from the show but ignores most of it.)





	Pox Dagura

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote the whole of this in 2014 as the first in a three fic series, intending to finish writing all three fics and edit them before posting. Life got very mad a quarter of the way into the second fic so I haven't worked on it in, Lord, three years. Let's add this to the pile of WIPs I'll tackle in 2018. I'm posting this now because, well, if it's up, even if it's in this rough and horrid state, I'll feel pressured to work on it. Guilt! The writer's motivation!
> 
> My intent with this series was to fill in gaps between the films and to address curiosities the show presented me with: why Astrid and Hiccup are sort of off and on in the show, Dagur, the explorations and new dragons suggested in the second film. But I never tried to make this really fit with the TV show, so I apologize for how off it might feel.
> 
> I haven't kept up with the show in its Netflix iteration, though I keep meaning to watch it. Here, Astrid's family is original, as is my version of Dagur's sister.

As most mornings, Toothless yowled down the chimney till Hiccup—rubbing the sleep from his eyes—stumbled out the chief’s house at the foot of the first mountain. 

“I’m coming, I’m coming. Mister Oh, No, Can’t Let Hiccup Get… More Than Two Hours…” 

Hiccup yawned hugely. Halfway into his autumn coat, one sleeve on and the other hanging mostly from his hand, he might very well have fallen asleep right there on the steps if Toothless hadn’t barked at him. Jerking up, Hiccup slapped at his face. The sleeve he hadn’t got on yet flopped. 

“I hear you, buddy,” Hiccup grumbled. He squinted at the horizon: the sun had yet to break over the ocean. “Aw, man… Really, Toothless? You couldn’t wait until the sun was up?”

Toothless absolutely could not have waited a single moment more. He skittered off the roof and landed heavily on the grass. Frost splintered beneath his weight. He lashed his tail forward.

Hiccup rubbed at his eyes again. “Okay, just—give me a minute. I have to go get some… things, and then we can go. I’m only getting some stuff! I’m not going back to bed!”

The frost crackled as Toothless paced, his tail lashing and lashing. He flashed the red fin pointedly.

“ _No_ , I’m not—” Hiccup threw his hands out, as if to push Toothless away. “Fine. You can just keep sulking right there for the whole minute it takes me to pack a bag and then when I come right back out you’ll feel like a big bully. Yeah. Oh, yeah! You’ll be so ashamed of yourself you won’t even wake me up before noon for a whole week.”

Toothless gave him a look: green eyes lidded, his jaw set back. 

“I’m still half-asleep,” Hiccup said, “so sorry, for dreaming. Look, just stay there, and I’ll be right back. Okay? Please? Please don’t set anything on fire?”

Toothless looked away and snorted. His jaw was still set.

Hiccup left the door open in his rush. It didn’t matter if he did; Stoick had left a few hours before, to join those who were hauling in the final catches of fish before the season changed. Hiccup’s prosthetic foot caught on the eighth stair to the loft, and he stumbled the rest of the way up, only barking one of his knees at the top. Grabbing what he needed, he threw it into a satchel and then bolted back down the stairs. He raided the kitchen, as viciously as any Viking ought, and got a finger closed in a cupboard for his patriotism. On the way out, he hooked his foot on the door and yanked it shut behind him. Leaving it open all day _would_ matter.

The morning flight drove the last traces of sleep from him. A powerful cold wind had come down in the night from the north, the advance of the first real snow storm of the season. That wind alone could have done it, but his survival instinct woke Hiccup entirely. The lengthening nights of autumn left Toothless restless and half-wild in the morn. He surged recklessly; he fought for turns Hiccup nearly missed; he chased the horizon, so far out from Berk, and the first pale fingers of sunlight unfolding above the curve of the world. Twice Toothless’ muscles bunched suddenly and he banked hard to the left, and Hiccup had to snap the fin into the right position to accommodate the violence of the turn. He was laughing the second time. The wind, tearing around them, made it so he could not hear Toothless, but he felt the vibrato of Toothless’ own happiness in his teeth.

“You want to try a twister?” Hiccup yelled. He slung low in the saddle, belly flat along Toothless’ back.

Toothless furled his wings and dove into the spiral. The ocean rushed at them. Faint lights burst, fragments of sunlight gleaming on the waves reaching to catch Toothless and Hiccup. The speed of it tore the breath from Hiccup. In the far peripheral of his vision, a black spot popped. Then, beneath them, a great, white crest neared. Hiccup slammed at the fin, as Toothless opened his wings, and they plateaued over the water, hopping over the wave near enough that a freezing mist pattered Hiccup across the face and Toothless’ tail broke through the water. 

Hiccup pulled in breath enough to laugh again. The vast muscular expanses of Toothless’ shoulders rippled; he beat his wings to rise higher again.

“Yeah!” Hiccup lifted his arms in a V and fell back in the saddle. “You want to do another one?”

Toothless skimmed through the air. He wriggled his head, and the wiggle moved down to his tail.

“Maybe later? Later.” 

Hiccup rubbed beneath Toothless’ head flaps. The purr in Toothless’ throat warmed the chilled tips of Hiccup’s fingers.

The sun at last deigned to peek over the horizon at the mountains. Hiccup and Toothless broke their fast on Sea’s Watch, one of the daughters of Berk, a high, wooded island joined to her mother by an old rope bridge that connected Sea’s Watch first to an island closer to Berk then Berk, farther off. The daughter islands stood clustered closely about Berk, while Berk’s sisters—the larger, inhabited islands—sat farther out to sea, where they mostly governed themselves. Sea’s Watch, with its old, half-crumbled watchtower from the days of the Viking war and its older thickets, was a favorite spot, one they visited regularly. The tide was only now rising, and the caves showed dark as worm holes at the bases of both Berk and her tall daughter. Toothless, in a teasing mood, feinted turning to one of the caves, but Hiccup set him right—and that, of course, was the joke, though perhaps only a dragon would find it funny.

Toothless snapped up the two smoked cod Hiccup had stuffed in his bag, then set to eyeing Hiccup as he made his own breakfast, a porridge of oats and water from the little pond on the island and some raisins left over from the day before. Hiccup mashed the lot of it together in a little bowl with the wood butt of his charcoal stick. Sniffing, Toothless thrust his head over Hiccup’s shoulder.

“What—do you want this?” Hiccup offered the bowl to Toothless. “You want to eat my breakfast too? I know how much you love grapes.”

Toothless made a hacking sound and tried to withdraw. Hiccup shoved the bowl at him.

“Mm, smell those oats. Did you, did you get a good strong whiff of that? Isn’t it amazing? You just can’t beat good vegetation. You know? When it comes to fulfilling your dietary needs.”

Toothless bared his gums. A growl started deep in his chest. Hiccup relented.

“Well, don’t blame me if you get sick.”

The prospect of a bad cold did not overly concern Toothless, and he settled in to wait for Hiccup. The progress of a line of ants fascinated Toothless and while Hiccup ate, Toothless tracked them from one end of the pond to the other, from one mound to another mound.

“Do you think they’re connected?” Hiccup asked. He sucked his spoon dry. The raisins were like small stones in the cold. “Ants only have one hill, but they’re going to both. And they aren’t killing each other. Maybe they’ve learned to get along, too.”

He smiled at Toothless, who was digging a claw into the mound. Ants spilled. Toothless lifted his paw, considered the ants panicking, and stuck his claw in his mouth.

“Yeugh!” said Hiccup.

“Hork!” said Toothless, and he shook his head with his tongue out. Black spots ran madly across his tongue.

“Well,” Hiccup said, in a voice that wasn’t so much strangled as gently throttled, “maybe next time you won’t lick it.”

Toothless turned away and horked again. His shoulders shuddered.

Hiccup scooped out the rest of the oatmeal for the ants. The sun peeked shyly between the trees, and though the wind promised snow to come and soon, the sky was clear. Hiccup burrowed into his coat. The fresh lining of fur in the collar tickled his nose, and he sneezed. His fingers were very cold. He tucked them into the sleeves. The day would warm as the sun overcame its stage fright, but for now it was awful chilly.

“We can’t stay out too long, buddy,” Hiccup said absently. He curled his fingers. “I have to help Astrid get the new targets ready for the afternoon.” 

Astrid had a new coat, too, a blue one with an explosion of fur all around the collar. She’d probably wear that to the academy, for the morning at least. The fur half-hid her smiles. He had to look for them when she wore that coat, to look at how her eyes creased or how the end of her nose would crinkle and then smooth out right away. Hiccup flexed his fingers again; his knuckles ached. 

The blue of the sky deepened as the sun inched higher. Hiccup sighed.

Toothless warbled. He tipped his head and blinked innocently.

“Oh—shut up,” Hiccup said. He scratched at his hair, mussing it so it fell over his eyes.

Toothless grinned and hooted at Hiccup, a husky hua-hua-hua that made perfectly clear what Toothless thought of all this.

Hiccup sank deeper into the shelter of his coat and glared at the sky. Astrid’s eyes were bluer. Huddling his arms around his chest, he collapsed slowly backwards onto the grass. The faintest sliver of a white cloud ran like silver through the sky. Toothless blacked the sky out; he leaned forward, his face upside-down to Hiccup’s.

“I don’t know,” Hiccup admitted. He squeezed his arms more tightly around his chest. Mostly he hoped maybe if he squeezed hard enough, the creaking of his ribs would outweigh the pinching in his chest. “Snotlout doesn’t worry about stuff like this.” Of course, Astrid had made it very clear precisely what she felt for Snotlout, so.

Toothless snorted. He didn’t see how Snotlout factored into this.

“Of course you don’t,” Hiccup said. “You don’t worry about girls. So actually you kind of have a lot in common with Snotlout.”

That got him a decidedly unpleasant look.

“I’m sorry. You’re right. That wasn’t fair.” He scrubbed at his face. “It’s just—I don’t know what to think. I _think_ she likes me… Right?” He craned his neck. “Toothless?”

Toothless had moved back to the ants, snuffling at them.

“Oh, thanks,” Hiccup groused. “Real supportive. Just the sympathetic listening ear a man could hope for in his time of need.” But Toothless had tuned him out and could not be goaded into feigning interest.

Hiccup dropped his head. The earth was hard, the frost already in the ground. A delicate sort of tickle started at his ear, and he flicked the ant away. He thought she liked him. Hiccup stared at the sky and imagined Astrid’s eyes instead: blue, a dark blue, and her eyelashes brown. She had a few very light freckles, mostly on her right cheek, and a wide jaw to match her wide face. If he was late to the academy grounds, she’d call him lazy or accuse him of forgetting his responsibilities, and she’d box Snotlout’s ear if he echoed what she said.

“Snotlout won’t be there,” Hiccup said out loud. She’d scared him off for good over the summer, and Hiccup thought it unlikely Snotlout would volunteer to help clean and arrange the grounds if he couldn’t score points—in his own head, anyway—with Astrid. “Not that you _can_ score points with someone. Definitely not Astrid.” Caring for people, that wasn’t a game. You couldn’t win at something like that.

Hiccup tapped his fingers against his ribs. She’d kissed him four times: on the cheek once, on the mouth thrice. His heart drummed. She’d gone red in the face and turned from him more times than that. She liked him. He thought she did. Possibly he only hoped she did. The edges of that old pit yawned, waiting to pull him down: who could like Hiccup? Hiccup the Useless, Hiccup the Muck-up—

He rolled onto his side and scowled at an ant, perched on the end of a blade of grass. The blade of grass dipped, pulled down by even the slight weight of the ant. Scratching noises distracted. He glanced at Toothless, who was digging at the ant hill.

“Leave them alone, Toothless,” he called. “You’ll have it hard enough as it is with winter coming, without someone tearing your house down,” he said to the ant as it picked its way down the blade of grass again. “Trust me. A dragon burned my house down once when it was snowing.”

Deprived of ants, Toothless plopped down in the grass beside Hiccup. He grumbled.

“Well, it better not have been you,” Hiccup said. He scratched Toothless’ chin for him, and Toothless sighed. He wished he’d remembered to put gloves on before he’d left the house. He’d show up at the academy with his fingers raw and red, and Astrid would ask him how’d managed to forget something like that. Then (Hiccup imagined) she’d find that soothing jelly they used for burns and bully him into rubbing it into his hands, no matter how nasty the jelly smelled.

“And what am _I_ supposed to do about it, anyway?” Hiccup asked. “It’s not like I can just go up to her and say, ‘Oh, hey, Astrid, I like you’—”

Toothless snorted.

“No,” Hiccup said, “I _can’t_. Because I can’t!”

Astrid would say: “Because _why_?” and she’d ask him again until he gave her a real answer. So Hiccup looked up at the blue-but-not-as-blue-as-Astrid’s-eyes sky and said:

“Because it would feel like—being Snotlout. Like oh, I’m the big hero now, look at me, I’ve ended this huge war, so of course you must be honored to know someone as great as me likes you.”

Beside Hiccup, Toothless stirred. He lifted his head and he did so, it seemed, only to make his withering look all the more withering.

“ _What_?”

Toothless blew hot air across Hiccup’s face and then stood again. He whicked his tail at Hiccup. Hiccup batted at Toothless as he passed and missed entirely. The red tail fin brushed Hiccup’s cheek. Toothless, naturally, had never had any trouble whatsoever expressing his feelings to someone like Astrid.

Hiccup rolled upright and hunted for the leather satchel. There. He snagged the strap with his prosthetic foot and hauled it up.

“While we’re up here,” he said, digging through the bag, “we might as well get this out of the way before we head back.”

Toothless’ hackles went up.

“Don’t give me that!” he mock-scolded. “You don’t even know what it is yet. Don’t you want to know what it is before you decide you hate it? Huh? Ba-by?”

Grumbling, Toothless turned away. His tail flicked again. Hiccup made a face at Toothless’ back and then dug into the satchel.

A bird startled somewhere off in the trees, near the overgrown path that led down to the caves or had, before rains and improper maintenance courtesy Berk’s public works department (nonexistent) washed it out. The bird, a dark bird with a pale breast, pinwheeled in the sky. Toothless snorted and dismissed the bird, but Hiccup watched it spiral higher and then spread its wings, scooped; for but a moment the bird seemed not to float or to hover but to simply exist in that precise spot between the earth and the sun, without any effort at all. He looked at the bird but he thought of Astrid: she’d a new trick like that with Stormfly, and she’d grinned smugly when she’d shown it off at the academy the other day. She’d been particularly smug when she’d looked at Hiccup, as though they were still competing with one another, or as if she’d meant to impress him. 

Caught up in thoughts of Astrid, he stubbed his finger on the tool he hunted. That was probably a sign, Hiccup thought. He stuck his finger in his mouth and fished the rest of the gear from the satchel.

“Here,” he said. He spread the lot of it across the grass. “You can look at it. It’s not so scary, is it?”

Toothless squinted at him but bent to sniff at the metal Hiccup had set out. They were only a few long things: two pieces that hinged and closed together, and a tool to tighten them. Toothless sat back on his haunches and blew air through his nose. The flaps at the backs of his cheeks fanned, and he smacked. Hiccup smiled. Trust a dragon’s curiosity.

“O-ho,” he said as he gathered the pieces up, “ _now_ you want to know what they’re for. Well, maybe I shouldn’t tell you. How about that?” He ducked behind Toothless’ wing.

Toothless twisted his head under so he faced Hiccup, upside-down. He smacked again. Hiccup crouched in the grass and began fixing the hinged pieces to the cords that led from the stirrup to the fin and back again. He wound a fraction the pull line around a small bobbin on the inside of the hinge of the first piece, and when he’d the first piece clicked into place, he grabbed the driver to twist the bobbin tight.

“Well, since I finished that fireproof cloak for Snotlout—and he needed that.” Toothless snorted and Hiccup shook the driver at him. “No, I know, he has to figure out how to get Hookfang to stop lighting up while he’s in the saddle, but until then he has to also not die from being set on fire. Not that Snotlout appreciated it,” Hiccup grumbled. Snotlout had stared at the cloak, cut leather with Nadder scales sewn to it in careful layers, and then asked Hiccup if he was planning on giving up dragon riding for tailoring and, if so, would he recommend Snotlout for the position of chief dragon rider? 

“Anyway, I needed something else to do. And I know we already went over this a couple Snoggletogs ago, but I think we should maybe revisit the issue…” 

Grimacing at the driver’s bite—twisting it had his palm numbing—Hiccup leaned hard into the final turn; harder than a larger, stronger person would have had to lean, he thought wryly. The tail fin, folded, snapped open, and Toothless jumped. His eyes narrowed and he barked at Hiccup. Hiccup smiled again and ran his throbbing hand along Toothless’ belly, petting him. 

“Me too, buddy. I don’t want to fly unless it’s with you either. But we’ve got to be reasonable about this.” He fixed the second piece around the cords, to maintain tension. “If we’re in the middle of—a something, and we get separated, you need to be able to fly. It’s not perfect, but it’ll help if you’ve got a rudder we can fix in place. We do it on the boats all the time.”

Toothless sniffed.

“No,” said Hiccup, “you’re much better than any old boat, Toothless. Okay, done.”

He gave up on tightening the spring of the second piece. If he pulled too hard, it might be too tight for Toothless to comfortably and readily move his tail. Rubbing his palm along his knee, he stood and took a staggering step back on his prosthetic foot. In the summer this island would be marshy and thick with mud; now, he could balance easily on the ground, hardened by the deep frost. 

Hiccup thumped Toothless on the shoulder. “So how about it, Toothless? Want to give it a spin?”

Toothless yowled. He most certainly did not want to give it a spin. Regardless: Toothless clambered to his feet, complaining the whole way, and shook his tail out. His legs bent; he dropped; his wings slicked back. Then in a fluid leap he shot from the ground into the air.

Hiccup shielded his eyes against the brightness of the rising sun and tracked Toothless’ progress. 

“Yeah! Good job!” he yelled, then: “Try turning left. Left!” He ran along the edge of the pond, gesturing as he neared the trees.

Toothless had decided to ignore Hiccup: he turned right instead. His tail shivered and then the fins steadied.

Hiccup cupped his eyes again and squinted. He’d thought he’d seen—yes, there it was again, a rippling of the prosthetic tail fin at odds with the angle of the wind. He hadn’t tightened that second spring enough after all, or he’d tightened it too much and when Toothless fought against the tension holding his tail too straight or too far to the left, the first piece had unspooled. Hiccup sighed. He didn’t have time to adjust the mechanism here, not without running late to the academy and to his appointment with Astrid. He dropped his hands to cup his mouth. Hiccup took a breath.

A twig snapped, very near. He turned on instinct. A large man with a wild beard struck Hiccup across the head, and soundlessly he collapsed. The man caught him. Swinging Hiccup over his shoulder, he stepped back into the trees.

Toothless did three circuits, wide around the island before the looseness of his tail bothered him too much to continue. His control wavered; the fin, jostled by the air, did not hold but instead fluttered. He looped in a lazily closing circle around the pond and landed neatly in the grass, just shy of Hiccup’s satchel. The clearing was empty. Toothless tipped his head and called for Hiccup. He called again. Another bird burst out of the undergrowth and set off for the blue sky and the distant promise of clouds, gathering for the afternoon. The snow was coming.

Toothless called a third time and then a fourth. The clearing was quiet but for the brief echo of his shout, and for the birds in the trees, shouting back. Hiccup shouted nothing at all.

*

Astrid got up at the usual time, just a bit after sunrise. Since the autumn had moved into Berk yet again—making all the presumptions tourists usually made of the year-round populace and no apologies, either—she’d latched the shutters of her window, so Stormfly had to settle for stomping on the roof and crowing. Astrid cracked the right shutter open just enough to get her nose out and said, “I’ll be down in a minute.”

About to pop back in, she paused and stuck her head fully into the cold. Stormfly had perched on the edge of the roof and tipped her head down to peer at Astrid. She keened.

“Go get a stick,” Astrid instructed. “A _big_ stick. Got it?”

The eaves creaked; Stormfly shifted her weight and crowed.

Astrid smiled and stretched to offer her hand. Bending, Stormfly sniffed at her fingertips and then gently nibbled at them.

“Good girl,” Astrid said. She swung the shutter back into place as Stormfly took off. The backwind off her wings rocked the shutter, and Astrid rushed to dress.

Stormfly could take long minutes if she wanted to track down the exact stick she wanted as her own, through the nigh on endless games of fetch she adored to chomping it to bits when they were done. In the mornings, though, she was impatient; she wanted to play right away, and she would put up with the indignity of a lesser stick. Astrid dunked her face in the bowl of wash water by her bed and jerked up again, gasping for air. Cold, she thought, cold, cold, _cold_. She wiped her face off.

Her mother had left for the day, off to do the work to fix up the winter pens for the sheep. She’d left a pot in the hearth, half-buried in hot coals. Using a rag wound around her hand to lift the lid, Astrid scooped the thick soup out in a bowl. As cold as the wash water had been on her face, the stew was as warm. She hissed but ate it quickly with a length of hard bread broken off the loaf. Stormfly wouldn’t be much longer.

Her new winter coat, the trim blue one with the thick fur collar, hung from the rack near the door. She grabbed it, then she cast about for her gloves. “Where,” she said. She’d left them in the pocket, so she wouldn’t forget them. Her hand on the door, Astrid turned back. She grabbed a second pair of gloves out of the bin by the door and then threw the door open.

Stormfly dropped to the ground at that precise moment, a long and twiggy branch clutched in her jaws. A shower of brown and withered leaves settled at Stormfly’s feet. She tipped her head, the better to display the branch, and chirped in her throat.

“It’s perfect,” Astrid said. She scratched Stormfly’s jaw. “Just like your timing.” 

Oh, but it was cold out; she wished she’d thought to grab a scarf too. Astrid turned her fur collar up.

“Drop it.” She caught the branch. Stormfly danced, shaking her wings. Astrid held the branch between them, the ends pointed to the ground and to the sky. As she very slowly moved the branch from one side to the other, Stormfly tracked it. She began settling into a crouch. 

“Ready? Then _fetch_.”

Astrid swung around on her heel and threw the branch to the side. Stormfly was off like a cross bolt. The leaves scattered. Astrid was off, too: she sprinted down the path to the village proper, and from there she’d run to the academy. Stormfly came upon her at the junction where the house path met with the village path. Astrid caught the branch when Stormfly spat it at her and she slung it in another direction for Stormfly to chase it, and find it, and bring it back.

She’d a sweat under her coat by the time they got to the academy, enough of one she was half-tempted to take off her coat even knowing the sweat would only worsen the chill of the morning. She settled for turning her collar back down, exposing her throat. 

“Good girl,” Astrid said, handing Stormfly the branch. “Beat me again! But I’m going to win next time.” She patted Stormfly’s brow.

Happily Stormfly settled on the training grounds to gnaw the branch to splinters. Astrid patted her cheeks, the gloves dry on her skin. She’d beat Hiccup, at least. She felt for the second pair of gloves, stowed neatly in her left pocket. She patted her cheeks again and paced around Stormfly. Her heart still thundered from the run, and she made herself breathe evenly: three count in; three count hold; three count out. 

Astrid looked up to the sky. Her fingers lingered on her jaw. The morning promised to be a clear one, bright if cold till the sun rose a bit higher. What thin clouds she did see moved quickly across the sky, blown south by a strong wind; the bite of that suggested the clear sky might not last. She traced the progress of those clouds. No telltale shadows presented themselves, though other dragons flitted by. Her fingers dug into her jaw, and Astrid dropped her gaze. Her heart was squeezing again. She took her hands from her face.

“He probably forgot his gloves again,” she said to Stormfly. “For someone as smart as he’s supposed to be, he doesn’t do a very good job of taking care of himself.”

She went on pacing, and Stormfly went on chewing, and the sun went on rising. The village was waking up now. Astrid dried slowly in her coat. The coat was very much a new one and finely made too, a gift from her mother to celebrate, and accommodate, her summer growth spurt. After the first morning frost last week, she’d worn the coat as she rode Stormfly out to race Hiccup and Toothless from Ravenspoint to the harbor. Hiccup had flustered: gone red, and said something about how warm she looked, and then gone redder. She’d smiled, that fur collar very warm indeed against her jaw, and then beat him soundly.

Later that day, Snotlout had joked that Hiccup had been distracted by Astrid’s new coat—specifically, the fur on her mouth—and that was why he’d lost. The twins had laughed, and Astrid had hit Snotlout on the shoulder, and Hiccup had gone into one of his moods, the pissy sort where he didn’t want to talk to anyone and when he did he talked to them as if he were his father and they were recalcitrant children. She would have hit Hiccup on the shoulder if he’d talked to her like that. He hadn’t talked to her at all.

“It’s easier when no one else is around,” Astrid said to Stormfly, who warbled. Astrid smiled and rubbed Stormfly’s eye ridge till Stormfly purred. “I didn’t mean you, Stormfly. I meant—Snotlout, and the twins. And Fishlegs. And everyone else.”

The first time she’d kissed Hiccup on the lips, she’d done it on the steps to his house before Stoick, before Snotlout’s da and another of the clan heads, and so many others, all their elders; but of course he had just miraculously survived losing a leg, and so what could that mean? She’d kissed him again that Snoggletog, in full view of the hall, and that had meant a great deal, though she hadn’t known it at the time. The jokes had started after that, her mother’s teasing, the chief’s appraising looks.

Astrid glanced skyward again. The blueness of it had deepened; the last of the clouds had blown away. 

“He’s late,” Astrid said.

Stormfly bit through the branch. She spat splinters and nuzzled at the longer of the two pieces. Pinning it with her wing, she worked the length between her jaws and got back to work. Astrid clapped her hands. The gloves muffled the noise, so that it came out as dull whack. Stormfly eyed her.

“Good idea, Stormfly,” Astrid told her. “Work is exactly what we need to do.” 

Working always cleared her head. Her mother said the fastest way to solve any problem was to hit something until you were too tired to allow for distractions. Once you got the brain to shut up, most things were easy to sort out. Throwing her ax would do the trick. The bite in her arm and shoulder as she drew the ax back, the whisk as it spun tidily through the air, the light on the iron head and the crisp thunk of it as the head buried in wood: the act clarified. But she’d real work to do and she meant to do it, even if Hiccup had forgotten he’d work to do as well.

Tying a broom to Stormfly’s tail, Astrid teased her into going around the arena, sweeping the dirt as she circled. One by one Astrid rolled the targets out of the old dragon holding cell. Originally designed as animal traps, they were meant to hunt game or wolves but used, too, in the days of the war, to catch a dragon by the foot and hold it there till a Viking might finish it off. Hiccup had appropriated the spring mechanisms and remade the lot so that they instead held items and, when the spring was triggered, launched their payloads into the air.

“That’s pretty clever,” Astrid had said when he’d shown her the prototype. “You must’ve been up all night calibrating that.”

“Not all night,” Hiccup had said, pleased. He’d hurried to demonstrate it with a block of wood. As he’d bent the jaws closed, forcing the spring down, Astrid had added,

“You should probably get rid of the teeth, though.”

The jaws snapped shut, nearly catching his fingers. Hiccup jerked his hand away, violently enough he had both his hands over his head and his rear in the dirt. He glanced at Astrid and offered a sheepish smile, his lower lip pulling down and to the side.

“That might be something I should address. Yes.”

“Mm. Maybe. Unless you want Gobber to make you a new hand too.” 

Astrid gave him her hand and heaved him up to his feet again. He stumbled slightly, more a consequence of the force with which she’d hauled him upright than anything else. His hand was dusty, his fingers callused not on the insides of the knuckles as Astrid’s were, from working with axes, but on the fingertips and the sides of his fingers. When he stumbled, he’d stumbled against her. Their chest brushed, their shoulders bumped, he turned his head and his eyes were right there and his breath was a startled little thing on her cheek. She’d sucked her own breath in and held it, as fiercely as her heart had clenched.

Then he’d stepped back, a long step, and Astrid fussed with her bangs, brushing them out of her eyes and then shaking her hair back entirely as she stuck her chin up.

“I’m fine with just the leg,” Hiccup said, half-babbling. He fidgeted with his sleeve, pulling it down his wrist then rubbing it up again. “I’m not sure how useful I could make a false hand. The fingers would be—” He flexed his fingers as though weighing them.

“You’d figure something out,” Astrid said. Now her heart was pounding, so loudly she wanted to smack it so it’d stop. “Or you could just file those teeth off and recalibrate the springs for the new weight.”

“Or I could do that,” Hiccup agreed, and he’d tried a smile, looking at her from under his bangs.

Astrid had smiled back, though her cheeks hurt with it and her chest, too. The arena was empty but for the two of them, and Stormfly and Toothless wrestling in the dirt, but she felt the vastness of the space as not an empty thing, but a place for eyes. The audience seating still ringed the top of the arena, and the twins liked to sneak around and spy. She crouched suddenly to examine the closed trap.

“So what did your dad say about you using the traps for this?”

Hiccup took a moment to answer. She glanced at him, and he’d a pinched look on his face, as if he were rethinking something he’d said or done.

“You did ask your dad if you could use the traps,” Astrid prompted.

Hiccup startled. “What? Oh—no,” he said, sucking his lip in between his teeth again. “Not … exactly. In so many words. Yet.”

“You just _took_ them?” She stood up fluidly, and Hiccup’s big, stick-y out-y ears had gone red, and his eyes had shot up to her face. “Hiccup! We need those for hunting!” She socked him in the shoulder.

He rubbed at his arm and said, “I only took four! And these ones didn’t even work until I fixed them up. The hinges were rusted so I had to replace them—”

“So you could’ve fixed them for the hunters,” she’d argued. “It’s almost winter! We have to build up our stores before the snows come.”

“We have dragons now,” Hiccup said, almost as he might explain it to Snotlout, “it’s not like the whole village is going to starve just because I borrowed four rusted traps.”

She whacked his shoulder with the back of her hand, just for that tone. “I’m not an idiot, Hiccup! And neither are you.”

“Well—thank you,” he grumbled. “I appreciate that vote of confidence.”

“We have to use all of our resources for winter.”

“I know,” he said, “but they’re just four traps. No one’s going to miss them.”

She huffed and crossed her arms. Hiccup did look contrite, but then he always did whenever someone else was right about a consequence he hadn’t considered, and then he’d go on anyway and pursue whatever wild idea he’d concocted next without thinking everything through first.

“I should have asked my dad,” he muttered.

“Yes,” Astrid said pointedly, “you should have.”

He threw her a dry look at that, but he only said, “The targets will be really useful for some of the new riders.”

Astrid held her arms tightly to her chest. Then slowly she relaxed, and she let her arms drop. I don’t want to be mean, she thought to him; but she couldn’t say it.

“So,” she said, “show me.”

Hiccup pointed out the trigger he’d manufactured, a long strip of metal sticking out from the side and connected to the spring at the base that, with enough force applied to it, would snap the jaws open and launch the block of wood. He very lightly tapped the trigger with his metal foot as he explained this, and both Astrid and Hiccup ducked when the trap burst open and the wood exploded out of it at a sharp angle. Toothless yowled.

Stunned, Astrid met Hiccup’s eyes. He was likewise shocked, lying in the dirt with his butt in the air and his hands covering the top of his head. Astrid had gone entirely flat on the ground, her hands on her head as well. Hiccup blinked.

“Well,” he said.

“It definitely works,” Astrid said, her mouth trembling, and then she started laughing.

Hiccup smiled in a lost sort of way, still looking as though he hadn’t a clue what had just happened, and he too was laughing.

“That almost took my head off!” Astrid said. She rolled up, a tricky thing to do when she was laughing as hard as she did.

“It almost took Toothless’ head off,” Hiccup said. He too struggled up again. “Sorry, buddy!”

Astrid looked back at the dragons: Toothless was snarling and rubbing at his head with a paw. Stormfly had pounced on the block of wood as a new toy, to chew and mangle and spit everywhere.

“Are you sure you want to use this in the academy?” Astrid said.

“Well, I have to recalibrate it,” he said shakily, “and take out the teeth—”

“No, I mean—” She swallowed air to calm herself, but the giggles came burbling out of her anyway. Her voice cracked. “Can you imagine if the _twins_ knew about this?”

“Oh,” said Hiccup, and he paled under his freckles.

Astrid hiccoughed, the price of all that air she’d swallowed, and clapped a hand over her mouth. She forced the next one down.

“They’d try to cram each other into the traps,” she said, and then she was laughing _and_ hiccoughing.

“Ohhh, Hlin save me, oh, gods—” He ran his fingers through his hair, messing it up further. “You’re right. I shouldn’t have taken the traps—” 

“No,” Astrid said, reaching for him, “no, no—it’s a good idea, Hiccup.”

She’d clutched his shoulders. His hands came up, holding her elbows. Their noses nearly touched. She knew she was red in the face from laughing, and she still hiccoughed, little gasps that burst out of her to run up against his face. He was red in the face too, though not only from laughter; he’d visions of doom in his head, she knew, if only because he’d so much experience with accidentally causing it. But he smiled lopsidedly at her, and his top teeth showed as they did when he was happy.

“You just have to fix it.”

His smile deepened, straightening out. Under her hands, his shoulders were thin, as weedy as the rest of him, and they were warm despite the coolness of the hour. He’d peeked at her through his fine red eyelashes, and the corners of his eyes had creased, and she’d wanted suddenly to lean into him and brush her lips across his, though anyone who walked the audience stands might see her do so.

That was when Toothless had come over and slapped Hiccup across the back with his tail, knocking him into the dirt. She’d let the moment go. When Hiccup sat up again, complaining that it had been an accident and he’d already said he was sorry, Toothless, Astrid stood up and brushed off her knees and pretended as if her heart weren’t still fluttering in her throat.

He’d worked on the traps all week till he decided, and Astrid agreed, that they were ready to bring out. They’d meant to set them up for the afternoon’s class with the children who hadn’t experience enough with their dragons to fly them, and here Astrid was setting those traps up on her own with the sun inching higher and Hiccup late. As she sat down to start blowing up the sheep bladder balloons, she tried to hold on to her first rush of anger. Hiccup was late to so many things; he got lost in daydreams or the clouds or creative frenzies. He was never late to a demonstration of his work, she thought. He was never late to a rendezvous with her.

Astrid stuck the pipe into the mouth of the balloon and blew furiously into it.

“Your head’s totally going to pop.”

The balloon deflated: she’d snapped her head up to look for Ruffnut and lost the pipe. The twins had climbed up the fence ringing the arena and hung over the lip, their arms dangling. Tuffnut had his helmet on but Ruffnut had traded hers for a thick woolen hat, knitted to look like a Zippleback’s head. 

“Way to go,” Tuffnut said, “now she’s stopped.”

“What are you two doing here?” 

Tuffnut swung his arms. “I don’t know. Why are we here?”

“Barf smelled your frustration,” Ruffnut said to Astrid, “so we came to laugh at you and Bossy Willow.”

“Where _is_ the little squirt?” Tuffnut asked, leaning dangerously forward. 

“He’s not here,” Astrid snapped. She grabbed for the balloon and the pipe, but the balloon, still leaking air, skittered off her fingertips.

“No wonder she’s frustrated,” Ruffnut told Tuffnut.

“Ha,” Tuffnut said, “I bet she—whoa!”

Leaning too far over the edge, he slipped and plunged into the arena.

“Idiot,” said Ruffnut.

Their Zippleback lunged onto the fence and Belch caught Tuffnut by the seat of his pants. The fence groaned a warning, the metal buckling, and the dragon hopped down into the arena. Stormfly, who had finished sweeping and begun chasing her tail, trying to get at the broom, brightened and bobbed her head in greeting. The Zippleback’s heads twined, shaking Tuffnut as he yelped and clutched at his helmet.

“I’m trying to work here,” Astrid said.

Ruffnut leapt off the fence and Barf snagged her out of the air, tossing her to the ground where she rolled in the dirt and came up on her feet.

“Nailed it,” Ruffnut crowed.

“No way,” said Tuffnut, still hanging from Belch’s mouth, “I could do that way better than you. Let me down, Belch, I have to show her how much better I am at stuff than she is.”

Obligingly, Belch dropped Tuffnut on his head. Ruffnut rocked back on her heels, cackling, and Astrid looked away quickly to hide her own unwanted smile.

“Stupid dragon!” Tuffnut rolled, clutching his head. His helmet spun in the dirt and settled unevenly, one set of horns up and the other set down. “Oh, I’m hurt—”

“Don’t be such a sissy,” Ruffnut scoffed. For good measure, she kicked at him, but Tuffnut caught her leg and yanked hard enough to pull her down with him. He got his fist in her gut, and she got his nose with her forehead, and then they were off.

Astrid pressed the balloon flat between her hands; the remaining air gushed out. Pocketing the balloon, she crossed to Stormfly and untied the broom. 

“No,” she said when Stormfly snapped at the handle, “this isn’t a stick.”

Stormfly settled, sulking, and refused to acknowledge either Barf or Belch’s attempts to snap at her. 

Swinging the broom so that she held it across both hands, Astrid weighed it as she would a new ax. The head had a long wooden beam into which the bristles had been glued with sap. Twice, she smacked the handle against her palm. The beam was long and solid. She nodded. It would do. Then, bringing it around her shoulder, she whacked both Ruffnut and Tuffnut across the arse with the back of the broom’s head.

Ruffnut howled and jumped up, clutching at her rear. Tuffnut, his face mashed into the dirt by Ruffnut, shouted something like, “No one beats me without my consent!”

“If you guys are done being idiots,” Astrid warned.

“We’ll be idiots as long as want to,” Ruffnut snapped. She scowled, rubbing hard at her arse. “Ugh—why are you in such a bad mood?”

Tuffnut spat dirt out and leered. “Probably because her boyfriend stood her up on their hot date—ow!” He fell over again, grabbing at the crown of his head. “I did not consent to that!”

“I _like_ bad mood Astrid,” said Ruffnut. 

Astrid brandished the broom at Ruffnut, who leaned out of reach and grinned.

“Good,” Astrid said, “because I’m in a _really_ bad mood. And I have actual work to do—”

“It wasn’t even a date?” Tuffnut scoffed. He launched at his helmet. Astrid’s strike nearly caught his butt; she caught the empty air instead. He crammed his helmet down as far as it would go, his long hair trapped over his eyes. “It was work? Weak.”

“Dummy,” Ruffnut scoffed right back at him. “That’s _how_ dorks date. Hey! Don’t hit _me_!”

“Hit her again,” Tuffnut suggested.

Astrid held the broom poised high, ready to strike at them both. Her teeth ached, clenched as they were, and her gut roiled. The broom handle bit into her hands. The fleshy pads at the base of her fingers hurt with the force of her grip. Ruffnut and Tuffnut both cringed. She breathed in through her nose, a very long, very slow breath. Three count in, she thought; three count hold. She exhaled. Astrid smiled. The twins cringed more.

“Well,” she said brightly, “since you’re both here, and Hiccup _isn’t_ , why don’t you two help me get the academy ready for the afternoon?”

“Oh, no,” Tuffnut said, from behind his hands, “we definitely could not do that.”

“We’re totally not responsible enough for that responsibility,” said Ruffnut, holding Tuffnut in front of her as she would a shield. “Like, remember last time? When we burned that barn down?”

“And Nobber cried like a big wuss,” Tuffnut said, “and Hiccup said we should _never_ help out again—”

Astrid swung the broom around, and Ruffnut shoved Tuffnut forward as he yelped; but Astrid only planted the head on the dirt and rested her hands, one on top of the other, on the handle’s butt. She looked pleasantly at them.

“Stop volunteering me,” Tuffnut hissed at Ruffnut, “I’m way too gorgeous to die!”

“Shut up!” Ruffnut said. “One of us has to carry on the family name and that’s totally me!”

Tuffnut snarled at her.

“See,” Astrid went on, before the twins started trying to murder each other again, “I’m _not_ Hiccup. And while he just doesn’t want to deal with your messes, I think you make messes on purpose so no one asks you to help.”

The twins stared at her in horror.

“Wha-a-a-a-at,” said Tuffnut.

“Um, no,” Ruffnut said, recovering more swiftly, “that’s, like—something a total smartie would do—”

“And we’re not smarties,” Tuffnut rushed to add, “we beat up the smarties, like Fishlegs—”

Astrid sharpened her smile. “Do you want to know what else I think?”

“Nnnno?”

“That Hiccup’s a total flake and you should go find him right now?”

“Yeah, that,” said Tuffnut. “Do that.”

“I think,” Astrid said, “that if you two don’t help, I’m going to take this end of the broom—” She shook the handle.

They helped, though they spent more time bickering over the proper way to blow up a balloon than actually blowing up the balloons. Astrid ignored Ruffnut and Tuffnut and steadily increased her own pile of balloons, tying each off with twine when it was full. She loaded the first trap and bent the jaws together, pressing the spring down till the trigger popped into position.

A few grey clouds had slipped into the sky as the morning progressed, so that fleeting shadows raced across the arena. Astrid concentrated on puffing up a balloon; she tried to concentrate on it, at least. The second pair of gloves in her pocket were light, but she felt their weight acutely. A little knot had twisted in her chest. It twisted more tightly. 

The twins had gone quiet behind her, their usual volley of barbs traded for whispers, the details lost but the tones of their voices—Ruffnut aggravated, Tuffnut strident—carried by the acoustics of the arena, open and round, the walls curving in upon it as they rose. Astrid turned, half expecting to see Tuffnut shoving Ruffnut into one of the traps, or Ruffnut shoving Tuffnut. Instead she found that the twins were studying her.

“What?” Astrid said.

Tuffnut and Ruffnut shared a look. He shrugged and gestured to Ruffnut to go on, and she punched his arm.

“You’re the _girl_ ,” he complained, and Ruffnut said, “And you’re the wuss!”

“ _What_ ,” said Astrid, and she readied the pipe to throw it.

“Are you—” Ruffnut paused, as though pained. She drew in a deep breath and then her shoulders drooped and so did her chin. “Are you okay?”

“Of course I’m okay,” Astrid snapped. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

Ruffnut glared at Tuffnut, who was flapping his hands at her again. Ruffnut screwed her mouth up.

“Um—because Hiccup isn’t here?”

Astrid turned from them so quickly her neck twinged. She steadied her hands. “He’s probably just off flying around somewhere.”

“Totally forgetting you,” said Tuffnut, with some weird measure of sympathy, and then he yelped. 

Astrid scowled at the pipe, at the balloon, at the trap she’d half-loaded beside her. Stormfly sang a question at her from across the arena.

“It’s not like him,” Astrid said to the pipe. “He doesn’t just forget things like—this.”

“Yeah,” said Tuffnut, “it’s gross, he’s always talking about you—”

“I meant,” Astrid said sharply, glancing at Tuffnut, “his commitment to the academy.”

“Oh,” said Tuffnut, and the twins shared another look. Tuffnut rolled his eyes, and Ruffnut rolled her shoulders.

Astrid clenched the pipe. What business was it of theirs where she stood with Hiccup, where he stood with her? All the village had gossiped about them at one time or another over the last two years; her own mother had teased once how fortunate Astrid was to form a love match with the chief’s heir. We aren’t anything, she wanted to say; but she did not know how much of that would be true and how much of it would be a lie. 

She’d kissed him four times; she’d imagined it more. The very first time she’d kissed him, so briefly on the cheek, he’d drawn a sudden breath in through his nose and gone entirely still. She’d run off then, with her hand at her chest, and she’d only barely looked back the once. Some small, weak part of her had thought then that perhaps he’d gone still because he hadn’t wanted her kiss.

“You’re still worried about him though,” Ruffnut said into the quiet, and Astrid bristled.

“How is that any of your business?”

Now the twins turned their stares on her. Tuffnut squinted, but Ruffnut arched her eyebrows so high they nearly met with her hairline, and yet somehow they looked so very alike in their surprise that Astrid remembered a time when they were perhaps seven or eight and the twins had gone around tricking people into thinking they were each other. Astrid had fallen for the joke just the once, and she’d frightened the twins so badly they’d never dared try it on her again, but Hiccup had been too shy then to contradict anyone and so he’d made an easy mark for fooling. She’d got mad at them for that, too.

“Seriously?” said Tuffnut.

“Uhhhh,” said Ruffnut, as she might to her brother, “because we’re _friends_?”

“Is she serious?” Tuffnut asked Ruffnut. He turned back to Astrid. “Are you serious?”

Astrid colored. She tipped her chin up and met their looks head on. Tuffnut had begun shaking his head, as though he still could not believe she was serious. Her pride stuck at her. She hated to be laughed at, and though neither twin had laughed at her for blushing, or for questioning, she felt it burning her ears anyway.

“So?” she challenged them.

Ruffnut rolled her head away, her whole body following. “Ugh. This is pointless. Let’s go, Barf.”

“Yeah,” said Tuffnut, still shaking his head from side to side as though _he_ were wise, “maybe Hiccup can explain this stuff to her. He’s good with feelings or whatever.”

“I hate feelings,” Ruffnut grumbled.

Tuffnut thrust his fists in the air and hooted. “Yeah! Screw feelings! Let’s go burn something, Belch!”

“Wait!” Astrid shouted. She’d stuck her hand out. No broom to threaten them, no pipe to throw. Just her gloved hand, her fingers splayed.

The twins both looked to her, Ruffnut dangling from Barf’s neck with her face upside down, Tuffnut still bent backwards and his fists held high. Ruffnut’s braids swung from her head. Overbalanced, Tuffnut took a shuffling step back to keep from tumbling over.

Astrid curled her fingers. She withdrew her hand. The temptation rose to bury her face in her fur collar. Astrid set her jaw.

“I’m going to find Hiccup,” she said. She rested her hands on her hips. “And you’re going to help me.”

Ruffnut groaned and dropped her arms; she hung from Barf’s neck by her knees. “Come onnnn.”

“He’s probably doing what you said,” Tuffnut said, dropping his arms too. “You know. Flying around. Talking to birds.”

“We’re going to find him together,” Astrid said, “because we’re his friends.”

“We never said we were _his_ friends!” Ruffnut protested.

Astrid whistled for Stormfly. “Come here, girl. We’re all going, so you might as well stop complaining now.”

“Since when are you the boss?” demanded Ruffnut.

“Since I’m meaner,” Astrid said, swinging up onto Stormfly’s bare back, “and I’m tougher and I said so.”

“Uuuuuuuugh!” said Ruffnut. She swung herself violently from side to side and nearly toppled off Barf. “It’s so unfair!”

“Yeah,” said Tuffnut, “I’m _way_ meaner than Astrid is.”

“Maybe you’d like me to demonstrate why I’m the boss,” Astrid offered. She offered them her fist, too. “Now come on. We need to get Snotlout and Fishlegs, too. We can cover the island faster with all of us.”

The twins complained about it, as they complained about most things involving any sort of responsibility, but if they didn’t fear Astrid anymore, she supposed they respected her in their odd, riotous way. Or perhaps they did remember how badly she’d kicked them around for making fun of Hiccup when they were eight and she and Hiccup were still somewhat friends, that first time around before she’d noticed all the things about Hiccup that made him different. Different had meant unnatural, then. 

Riding without a saddle wasn’t the most pleasant experience, even over short distances. Amidst the usual mid-morning crowd of people bustling through the village, Snotlout was on his way to the arena, his black hair flat against his head. Hookfang had appropriated Snotlout’s helmet for his annual teething episode. Without his helmet, Snotlout’s ears stuck out, and what little resemblance he shared with Hiccup, cousin on his mother’s side, and Hiccup’s mother’s side, showed as clearly as did his ears.

“Snotlout,” Astrid called. She nudged Stormfly with her knee, and Stormfly dropped before him. Astrid patted Stormfly’s crest to still her, and rather than go into her usual bob and weave, Stormfly just gurgled at Hookfang.

Hookfang looked balefully at Stormfly and chomped down on the helmet.

“Hey,” Snotlout said. He raised his hand in greeting then hesitated; his hand dropped. “Astrid.”

He didn’t quite meet her eyes, and then, when he did, his cheeks went a dull, dark color. The thing from the summer still sat there between them, that moment when she had at last frightened him off for good by treating him as he had treated her. It could go on sitting there a while longer.

“Get Hookfang ready,” she told him. “We’re going out to find Hiccup.”

Snotlout snorted and rolled his shoulders, left and then the right, puffing back up to his usual state. “We gotta go save my cousin again? What’d he do this time? Try and make friends with a troll?” He looked at Hookfang as though to share a laugh. Hookfang was far too busy crushing Snotlout’s helmet to share in anything.

“I don’t know if we have to save him yet,” Astrid said, “but he was supposed to help me get the academy set up this morning and he never showed up, and that’s not like him.”

The dull color had come into Snotlout’s face again. “Missed your date, huh?”

Circling overhead on Barf and Belch, the twins laughed, at Astrid or at Snotlout or both of them.

“Just saddle up, Snotlout,” Astrid snapped.

“Okay, okay! Relax!” He held his hands up, and Astrid thought about asking Stormfly to stomp on him. “It’s no skin off my nose, being the hero again. The ladies love a hero, and the ladies do love me.”

“Ohhh, Snotlout,” crooned Ruffnut as she mock-swooned, swinging from Barf’s neck. “You’re so-o-o strong. Won’t you pick me up in your big, manly arms?”

“He said ladies,” Tuffnut shot back, “not you.”

Snotlout was nearly purple. “Hey, when I want your opinion—”

“And you two!” Astrid said, stabbing her first and second fingers at them. “Go find Fishlegs and tell him to saddle Meatlug up.”

Ruffnut stared at her. “Why?”

Astrid sucked in the breath to shout. 

“‘Cause he’s already on Meatlug,” said Tuffnut. He pointed behind Snotlout, and Astrid turned.

“Guys!” 

Fishlegs waved frantically at them as Meatlug bowled down the hill, scattering the crowd of gossiping old men gathered outside Pitstain’s tavern and startling the wits halfway out of two women bearing baskets of bread. One of the women swore at him.

“Guys!” Fishlegs shouted. “I think we might have a problem!”

“Fishlegs!” Astrid hissed, as he drew near. Stormfly antsed in place. “Keep it down!” 

Fishlegs paused and looked about. The gossips had come together again, like any flock of chickens, though they were certainly no spring hens, and they and both of the women were considering the teenagers and their dragons. That Astrid and the others were often engaged in the defense of Berk was common knowledge through much of the immediate archipelago, no more so than on Berk herself.

Fishlegs clapped his hands over his mouth. His eyes were huge over his fingers. “Oops,” he said.

“Blabbermouth,” Ruffnut said witheringly. Barf snickered. “You’re gonna start a panic.”

“Cool idea,” said Tuffnut, “except when it’s not.”

“What is it?” Astrid sidled up next to Fishlegs. The knot in her chest had moved down to her gut. “It’s Hiccup. Isn’t it?”

Fishlegs parted his hands. “Toothless actually,” he said very softly. “But I think Hiccup _is_ in trouble, because Toothless is alone.”

“Where? Show me now. Snotlout,” Astrid said, rounding on him, “get Hookfang saddled.”

“He’s teething,” Snotlout protested. He cast a protective arm over Hookfang’s snout, and Hookfang growled. “He’s in a really sensitive place right now.”

“I’ll hit you in a sensitive place if you don’t go find that saddle,” Astrid warned him. “Find us when you’re done.”

“Thought you wanted to be the big hero, ladykiller,” Ruffnut teased Snotlout, and he threw her an obscene gesture with both hands.

Astrid gave them all quelling looks. “Ruffnut, Tuffnut—go close up the academy. Then you come meet us, too. And don’t argue with me! Let’s go,” she said to Fishlegs, and they rose together to cut across over Berk.

Stormfly flew both more quickly and more steadily than Meatlug could and did. Astrid held her back to allow Fishlegs to lead, though Stormfly fought to race. No matter Astrid’s worry, or Stormfly’s sensitivity to her nerves, Stormfly wanted badly to make it into a game. Astrid petted Stormfly’s crest and promised to race her again later.

Fishlegs had taken Meatlug out foraging for a particular kind of rock she enjoyed eating, he explained. That was how he’d found Toothless.

“He’s stuck in the undergrowth. I tried to cut him out but he wouldn’t let me near him with the knife, and I didn’t want to make it worse.” Fishlegs hesitated. “Astrid—I didn’t see Hiccup anywhere. And Toothless is _really_ upset.”

“Toothless isn’t in the village yet?”

“Probably not,” Fishlegs said, “unless he set the woods on fire.”

“Good,” Astrid said grimly. “We really don’t need to start a panic.”

“I’m sorry,” Fishlegs said. “My pretty girl does the best she can but she’s not the fastest dragon.” He rubbed his palm along Meatlug’s head and she panted happily. “I guess I just wanted to let you know as fast as I could.”

“It’s all right, Fishlegs. Maybe there’s nothing to panic about anyway,” Astrid said.

Fishlegs glanced at her. She focused on the village beneath them, the patchwork sprawl of houses, the winding paths.

“Maybe,” Fishlegs said. 

Astrid wondered if it had sounded as false coming from her as it did from Fishlegs. Compressing her lips, she leaned into the wind as it rushed off Stormfly’s frill and blew coldly, painfully so, into Astrid’s face, stinging her cheeks till she was halfway numb with it. She held tightly onto two of Stormfly’s horns. Even through her woolen gloves, she felt the chill. Even with her fur collar turned up to hide her jaw, she felt it.

The village fell away; they left it behind. The clouds were thickening, and the day turning grey, so that as they passed over the consecrated forest on the mountain north of the village proper, the treetops appeared darker than they were. Stormfly and Meatlug’s shadows showed only faintly. The sun had nearly vanished entirely behind the clouds. Fishlegs led them down to the expanse of old growth trees nestled in the wide but shallow depression at the base of the western face of the mountain.

Stormfly surged ahead; she’d caught Toothless’ scent. 

“Watch the trees!” Astrid yelped, ducking behind Stormfly’s crest as she dove. That was something they’d have to work on, then. 

Coming to perch on a sturdy enough branch, Stormfly trilled. The trees grew thickly together here in the sacred forest, where no one was permitted to cut wood, and the darkness was knotted as thickly. Toothless snarled, and several harsh cracking sounds burst out. Astrid slipped off Stormfly’s back and landed catlike in a crouch on her toes. Another furious roar came from left of her, and in the shadows Astrid oriented.

“Toothless?”

He growled and then he was quiet. Astrid felt through the shadows for the trees, trying to spot Toothless, black as night, as her eyes adjusted. He made a plaintive sound, very close by, and Astrid bashed her knuckles up against something heavy and warm and ridged as with scales. That was his tail, she realized. 

He was caught thoroughly in a nest of thorny vines; he’d tried to get out and only snared his wings, too. “I’m going to get you out of here,” Astrid said. She petted what of his tail she could. The red fin was folded and spotted with dirt, but she didn’t see any holes in the thick canvas. He hadn’t been shot down, though who could do that, or would dare, so far in-land of Berk? What relief she felt at that faded: if he hadn’t been shot down, then where was Hiccup? Astrid set her teeth against the little spike driving up her chest.

“I have to use my knife to free you, Toothless.” She bent to pull the blade out of her boot.

Toothless erupting, thrashing against the vines. His tail thumped against her legs, and she leaned against a near tree for balance. She’d seen it before, a tame animal turned violent when caught in a trap. 

“Easy! Easy, it’s me!” She grabbed for his tail and petted it, over and over till he calmed. Bound as tightly as he was he couldn’t twist his head around to look at her. She modulated her voice, trying for the serene tone Hiccup used so well. “I have to get you out so we can find Hiccup. Okay? You know me. It’s just me. I’m right here. I’m going to cut you free now. All right?”

He warbled again, and then he huffed once, twice, his breath heavy. A powerful tremor ran through him and up her hand, resting on his tail. She waited another moment, to see if he’d move again, and behind her she heard Fishlegs and Meatlug landing, crashing through the trees. Her eyes had almost entirely adjusted to the shadows. She saw it when Toothless laid his head down.

“Okay,” Astrid said. 

She worked quickly, sawing through the vines and then yanking them free. First one thorn and then another caught her fingers through her gloves. Astrid bit her lip and pressed on. It got easier as she went along and Toothless had more room to wiggle out of the loosening grip of the vines. He strained, trying to spread his wings, but the vines were as yet too thick across his back, and he snarled. Stormfly twittered nervously.

“Can I help?” Fishlegs asked.

“Get Stormfly back,” Astrid said, “before Toothless upsets her.” Grabbing on to one of the vines, Astrid heaved herself up onto Toothless’ back.

Toothless rumbled beneath her. His crest flaps fluttered, fanning then sleeking back against his head, and he moved his head from side to side. 

“I’m almost done,” Astrid said to him. “Then we’ll find Hiccup.”

Another shudder went through Toothless, but he grumbled assent. They lost another few minutes as Astrid broke the vines, peeling them from his back, his wings. His skin was thick enough they’d done no harm to him, aside from slowing him and then stopping him. Astrid, crouched on his back, pulled another vine free, and that did it. Toothless surged, and Astrid threw her arms over her face, too late. A thorn scratched her across the cheek. The remaining vines snapped wildly, and then Toothless was out.

She dashed the blood from her face. A red streak darkened the back of her glove. 

“He’s out!” she shouted back to Fishlegs. 

Astrid dropped into the saddle. She’d flown Toothless only the once, but he gave her little time to recall how to work the stirrup that controlled his red tail fin. Toothless bounded for the nearest tree, scaled it as Astrid pressed flat against his neck, and then leapt into the air. She jerked the pedal at an angle and the fin cocked so that Toothless veered sharply left; she jerked it again and the fin spread into position. Toothless snapped at her.

“I’m doing the best that I can,” she snapped right back. More gently, she laid her hand on the back of his head. Her cheek stung, wet and now cold with it. “Show us what happened.”

Toothless turned, navigating around the mountain to the north, over the great green woods toward Ravenspoint and, beyond that, the sea where the first daughters of Berk lay joined to their mother by old bridges or nothing at all. Astrid glanced over her shoulder. Fishlegs and Meatlug were behind them. Stormfly, nearer, closed the distance. She keened at Astrid and then banked to brush her wing over the top of Toothless’ wing, so very softly.

“Good girl,” Astrid said. She stretched a hand out to Stormfly, and Stormfly fell back to let Astrid caress her jaw. “Sweet girl.”

Toothless made to turn, and Astrid dropped her hand to the saddle horn. Twisting the pedal, she got the fin into place for the gradual, swooping descent. How much time had they lost, she thought, because Toothless could not fly? How much time had they lost because Astrid had told herself nothing was wrong when Hiccup didn’t show?

She bent in the saddle to touch her brow to Toothless’ head. 

“We’ll find him,” she said. “I promise.”

*

His bed rolled beneath him. As a general rule, beds did not do that sort of thing. Hiccup wondered at that, in the vague way of someone who isn’t really asleep but hasn’t yet woken up. He couldn’t feel his hands, or he could feel them but only distantly, like they’d fallen asleep. He couldn’t feel his left foot, either. Frowning, Hiccup turned and banged his head on wood. Stars burst in his skull. He didn’t remember his bed being set against the wall. A dizzying wave of blackness washed over him, so that he wanted both to collapse and to turn the other way and vomit. He did neither, instead gulping at the air, only there was something in his mouth so he had to breathe through his nose. Sea air: the stink of brine flooded his throat. His stomach roiled.

Hiccup flopped onto his back and squinted. The light hurt his eyes; there wasn’t much of it. The day was cold, and dark, and very grey. What had happened to the roof? When he’d turned onto his back, he’d rested on his hands. His wrists ached, throbbing dully. He couldn’t bring his hands forward. 

The ocean rustled, waves beating against the wall beside his head. Someone was rowing. A man sat on the seat in the back of the boat, a man with a thick beard who kept scratching at his arms. He was keeping watch over Hiccup. Hiccup stared at the man. He did not know him, not by the face, or the beard, or the angle of his shoulders. Hiccup was in a boat, with a strange man watching over him, and someone else rowing, and all he could see was the white sail, puffed with wind, and the grey of the sky beyond that. They’d laid him down in the bottom of the boat, so that he could see neither the ocean nor Berk as it receded. 

Toothless, Hiccup thought. He’d an image, clear in his head amidst the fog, of Toothless showing black against the sky, blue then. Where was Toothless? He tried to sit up, but the pain that started in his shoulders, his hands bound as they were behind his back, froze him long enough that the man at the back of the boat could easily reach over and slap the back of Hiccup’s head. The stars came out again; the blackness followed. He collapsed.

“Watch it,” said the man who rowed. “Dagur wants the brat alive.”

The man with the wild beard snorted. “He’s alive.” He held his fingers under the boy’s nose, to prove it. 

“It’s your head if he has no head when we get there.”

“Both our heads,” said the guard, “with the chief as he is.” He scratched at his arm through his sleeve.

“So,” said the rowing man. “Leave off the lad.”

Hiccup slept without dreams, without thought. He found no comfort in it. The boat moved on through the roughening waters. The wind from the north strengthened as the morning gave way, and the cold of the day sharpened like a dull blade taken to a whetstone. The men of the boat had no blankets and so they gave none to him. Alone, at the bottom of the boat, Hiccup shivered. He’d no awareness of it, or of the cold, or of the color his lips turned, or of the little feeling left in his hands then leaving them. He’d no awareness of anything till consciousness intruded on him again.

It came first as a dream: a memory in a dream. He was a boy, a small boy, too skinny. He’d fallen over into the snow, and his trousers were soaking through. Tuffnut had pushed him there.

“Dummy,” said Tuffnut scornfully, “I’m _Ruffnut_.”

“Got him a _gain_ ,” said the other twin, and they laughed together. Their laughs were the same, their faces, the wildness of their hair. If you squinted, they sort of merged into one person, one awful, nasty person.

In his head he was brave. In his head, he always said clever things. He’d look at the twins and he’d say something like, “If you’re too stupid to remember who you are, nobody else is going to bother remembering.” Then they’d smash his face into the snow and Ruffnut would pull his coat up over his head and Tuffnut would pull his pants down past his knees and they’d leave him there. So Hiccup just sat there in the snow as they laughed. He sat there, as useless as everyone always said he was behind his back. That wasn’t true. Sometimes they said it to his face, too. Snotlout especially liked to say it to his face, and then Snotlout would laugh and that was even worse than the way the twins cackled in sync with one another.

Hiccup laid down in the snow with his arms spread out on either side. He couldn’t really feel his shoulders, but he wasn’t too worried about that. Gobber would have a fire going at the forge. In a little bit, Hiccup would get up and he’d sit down by the hearth with his knees drawn up and his arms folded around his legs and he’d make up some fantastic story about defeating five trolls all on his own with nothing but a twig and a bit of Viking ingenuity. 

“Ingenuity?” Gobber would say. “Viking? I think those trolls might have whacked you harder on the head than they ought have. That’s trolls for you. No kindness in ‘em for the weak.”

The twins were probably trolls. They smelled like he thought trolls might smell. He would have wiggled his fingers in the snow if he could have done it but those were numb too, and so he went on lying there, wondering if he might as well just go to the forge now and try to sleep.

A shadow fell over him. Astrid stood behind his head, looking on him so that her face showed upside-down to his. She couldn’t have been Astrid, though. Too tall, for one, and too old, for the other, but she was pretty in the same way Astrid was pretty, with a wide jaw and broad cheeks and a nose that stuck out at the end. She certainly scowled at him like Astrid scowled.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

“Staying out of the way, I guess,” he said. 

She raised her eyebrows and cocked her head to the side. Her bangs swung, passing over her eyes. She brushed them away.

“By freezing to death?”

“Well,” he said. “It’s not ideal.”

“No, it’s not,” she agreed. She crouched in the snow and crossed her arms over her knees. “It sounds to me like it’s pretty stupid, actually.”

She wasn’t a child, but he wasn’t a child either. The twins hadn’t pushed him into the snow for years. He looked up at Astrid, with her face tipped down and her braid hanging from her shoulder and her eyebrows arched as she looked down at him in turn, as though he were her friend.

“That’s easy for you to say,” Hiccup said to Astrid. “You’re Astrid. I’m just … me.”

“So?” She nudged his head with her foot, and he winced. “Don’t you think it would be a little weird if you were me?”

“To have everyone look up to me? Think what a great Viking I am? Yeah,” Hiccup said, “that’d be real weird. I wouldn’t know what to do with myself.”

The sun was in her hair. She gleamed, gold and bright and so absolutely unlike Hiccup in every way that he swallowed and looked away.

“For starters,” Astrid said, “you could get up.” 

As if to demonstrate, she put her hands on her knees and pushed herself up to her feet again. Her braid thumped against her chest. She straightened her neck. He thought of joking that he could see up her nose, but the truth of it was when she stood like that over him, with her fingers curled over her hips and her spiked skirts settling across her wide-set knees, his tongue fell down his throat. She only needed the raven to complete the picture. Hiccup rather suspected no valkyries would collect his soul from the field of battle. This was the closest he’d ever get, was Astrid looking laughingly at him and saying again:

“Get up, Hiccup.”

The snow seeped through his coat. He was cold all over and when Astrid had gone, he was alone, too. He wished she would come back. He didn’t know how to call for her. If he could catch up to her, he thought. He’d done it once, caught up to her on Toothless, but she hadn’t listened to him then. Had she? He remembered a girl in a tree who shouted at him, who told him she didn’t want to hear anything he had to say. He’d held his hand out to her anyway. He’d wanted her to take it, but she hadn’t. 

His head ached horribly. He hadn’t thought Astrid had kicked him that powerfully. She’d only whacked him a bit to wake him up, and he’d rolled out of bed on his own. She had something important to tell him about Heather but he didn’t want to listen to Astrid. She was always so suspicious of people. He’d told her that and said he didn’t know why she did that. Astrid had gone red and said he was too trusting. 

Too nice, Hiccup thought, too soft, not enough the Viking. What sort of Viking wanted peace? A coward. He’d catch up to Astrid and he’d explain to her that he wasn’t the coward she thought him to be; but Astrid didn’t think him a coward. Did she? He was cold, brutally cold, and he was holding Astrid who was holding Hiccup in a cave in the ice, and he was looking at her and wanting to say something important only he couldn’t remember what it was. Astrid was looking at him and her mouth was drawn and her eyes were large and almost sad. She might have been afraid, as he was afraid, but Astrid was never afraid, not of anything. She wasn’t like Hiccup.

The ground rocked beneath him. He hadn’t lain in the snow but floated in the sea, and now he was drifting off, off, and no one would find Hiccup and no one would miss him and that would be that. Then Astrid would never let anyone see her eyes like that, so very nearly sad. No one would miss Hiccup.

Toothless would miss him. He thought: Astrid would miss me.

The ground rocked. His head rocked, too. Hiccup’s eyes fluttered. The light of the day, meager though it was, stung him. He cringed. Those were clouds overhead, thick ones: snow clouds. They’d ate the sun. He was in a boat, and the boat was at sea, and there was a gag in his mouth and his hands were tied behind his back. He’d lost the sensation in his fingers. Trying to curl them, he couldn’t tell if he’d succeeded or not. 

In small scraps, the memories returned. He’d gone flying with Toothless. He’d rigged the fin so that Toothless could give flying solo another shot. A man had bashed him over the head. 

What little he could see of the boat suggested it to be far too small to bear Toothless. Hiccup chanced turning his head. Immediately he clamped his teeth and tensed, trying not to vomit. With the gag in his mouth, he’d choke on it. He sucked several shallow breaths in through his nose. After intensifying, the dizziness then eased. He kept breathing, focusing only on that, till it evened out and the motion of the boat, and the spinning in his skull, no longer left him praying to any god who would listen that he wouldn’t choke to death on his own sick.

“Didn’t I say,” a man said. His boot scraped over the wood, and the toe pressed into Hiccup’s cheek. He flinched away. “Alive and well. Seems your head’s still safe.”

Another man, farther away, grunted. “Keep him that way.”

That he’d flinched at all stuck at Hiccup. He heaved in a deep breath, held it, and then struggled to sit up. A wave of colors rushed to beat at him. The tighter he squeezed his eyes, the more wildly they entwined with one another. More worrisomely, black spots lurked at the edges, waiting. Hiccup got one knee up and then fell forward against it. His knee drove into his chest; his head hung. He’d bit the side of his tongue.

“Hey now,” said the man at the back of the boat, the one who had pushed his boot into Hiccup’s face. “Where do you think you’re going, laddie?”

Hiccup tilted his head, just enough that he could glare at the man. But his hair fell into his eyes, and he felt the sweat on his face, already chilling his skin as the wind came for them. He shivered. He’d been shivering.

The man laughed. “He’s just a kitten.”

“That’s why I told you to go easy. You want to knock his head off?”

“Don’t worry, kitten.” The man smiled somewhere in his beard. “Better times.”

“If you don’t shut up, I’ll hit you with this oar.”

“I’m being hospitable!”

Sea spray had darkened Hiccup’s coat. That was what he’d felt when he dreamt of snow, melting through his clothes. He tucked his face to his knee. The copper taste of blood turned his tongue. He’d a knife in his boot, unless they’d taken that from him. With his hands tied, it had no value. They’d left him his peg leg with its pick end, the one for walking on ice, but he couldn’t turn that out with his hands tied either. The small tools tucked in the cuff compartment were out, too.

The knots were too tightly done to work his hands free. That was too much to hope for. Even if he did get his hands free, stuck on a boat with his head swimming as it did, he’d few options other than drowning or letting them bind his hands again. Hiccup flexed his fingers. A hot ache ran up his wrist. The other hand had gone too numb even for that. He’d seen what frostbite could do to a hand. He’d no gloves, and they’d tied his hands so that he’d lost all feeling in them. 

Hiccup tried to work his teeth around the gag. He tried speaking, too, in the chance that some of it might be discernable. The man in the back only laughed again, and the man who rowed swore and told his companion to shut it. 

“No, the gag’s staying there,” said Hiccup’s guard. “We’ve heard about you, dragon tamer. Can’t have you summoning up one of your scaly friends to rescue you. Eh?” He wouldn’t have cared had Hiccup’s hands fallen off right before him. 

Stiffly, Hiccup shifted his weight to show the man who was rowing his hands. He kicked the side of the boat with his metal foot, loudly so the man would look up.

The man swore again. “How tight you’d tie those?”

“Tight enough,” said the guard. He itched at his shoulder. “He’s slippery. You know how many times he’s got out of scrapes? You haven’t had to sit through the chief’s every star-dazed rant.” He shrugged. “We’re nearly there anyhow. Let the chief decide how tight he wants them ropes.”

The man rowing met Hiccup’s eyes a moment, then he looked away. His shoulders rocked. The boat slipped on through the water. Hiccup braced against his knee. He wanted to sit up straight, to sit up tall, but the pounding in his head was so great that sitting, even as weakly as he did, took everything he could give. He let his head sag again. 

It was the afternoon, he thought, or else the snow storm had moved in more quickly than he’d anticipated. The realization hit him in the breast: he’d missed his appointment with Astrid. As suddenly, before that regret could coalesce into anything stronger, he realized, too, that Astrid would notice he was gone. She didn’t take kindly to anyone reneging on their promises or their responsibilities. She’d be furious when Hiccup hadn’t shown. She’d march right out to yell at him or pull on his ear, and when she didn’t find him or his ear anywhere, she’d go out looking for him. 

Some little, shameful thing in him, fed by the aching of his head and the throbbing in his wrists, hoped she’d worry. It was the old, childish fantasy. Won’t you miss me when I’m gone? Hiccup turned his face to his drawn-up thigh. His brain had scattered when the man had hit him. Of course Astrid would miss him. He let his breath out, the gag dampening. She’d gather the rest of the teens. His father, too, possibly. He only had to keep his wits about him till they arrived; his wits, and his fingers, if he could get his hands free soon. 

The sea wind knifed through him. Hiccup drew his shoulders up. The fin hadn’t held. He remembered that. How far out had Toothless had been, the last Hiccup had seen of him? Had he been over the ocean, or land? The boat rolled, batted up then down by deepening waves. Over land, Hiccup prayed. The men in the boat held their silence. The chop of the oars driving into the water battered at Hiccup, the sound of it harsh next to the whistle of the wind.

My dragon, Hiccup thought. What about my dragon?

“Head up, lad,” said the bearded man after a time. “Be courteous.”

Hiccup opened his eyes. He’d lapsed not into a doze, but something else like to that, and he had to squint at first to see. A sea fog had blown across the water. Out of it resolved two great longboats, their sterns at cross angles with a distance between them. The man rowing stopped and pulled the oars into the boat, so that he might manage the sail. The boat passed through that shadow, and it rocked severely in the confluence of waves. Ahead of them was a third longboat, this one tall on the water with a black sail, drawn. As Hiccup lifted his head, he saw that the boats that had stood like guardians were but two of five, ringed widely about the boat with the black sail. 

Dread came. Something colder came with it. He knew that flag high on the mast, emblazoned with the sigil of the dragon vomiting lightning.

They approached the main vessel. The guard stood and shouted, and another threw a rope ladder down to them. Hiccup struggled to get his feet under him, to no use. The guard simply bent, caught him around the waist, and hefted Hiccup to his shoulder. One-handed, he began to climb. Hiccup glanced at the man left in the boat, the man who had sworn to see Hiccup’s hands bound so tightly they’d gone blue. He’d his attention on his own hands, worn from the rowing, red as with a rash.

The guard’s shoulder bumped Hiccup in the gut. He squeezed his eyes shut, fighting that fresh wave of nausea.

At the rail, the guard tossed Hiccup over. Hiccup landed on his back, and his hands, and he arched to get off his arms. More men were there, more guards, to catch him and haul him to his feet. The world spun wildly. Hiccup spun with it. His gorge rose, and gag or no gag, he knew he was going to be ill. He was certain of it when the world settled, and Dagur, standing before him, smiled.

“Hello, brother,” said Dagur.

Hiccup breathed raggedly. He blinked the sweat from his eyes, a sweat that had him shivering when he would have rather stood as tall as he could before Dagur, taller still.

“What!” Dagur took a step back and spread his hands. He looked around at his men, as though he wanted their thoughts. There were very few men on the deck; the guard, the two men who held Hiccup, and another man at the steps leading to the hold. Dagur eyed Hiccup. “No warm hello for your dear old Dagur?”

Hiccup gave his thoughts on this. The gag muffled it into a thing less obscene. How courageous, Hiccup thought.

Dagur flicked his fingers. “Take the gag off.”

One of the men pulled a knife for it. The blade cut through the cloth; the tip passed briefly across Hiccup’s nape. The guard had tied the gag too tightly as well, the knot pressing into the base of Hiccup’s skull. Some of the pressure in his head alleviated.

“That’s better, isn’t it?” said Dagur.

Hiccup swallowed. His mouth was dry. He looked at Dagur then quickly away. Something awful, like hate, had shot through Hiccup’s chest. 

“My hands,” said Hiccup with his too-dry mouth.

Dagur shrugged. “Why not? Those too. Wait—” He cut in close and lashed out, kicking Hiccup hard on the inside of his leg. Hiccup staggered back. “Ha! Brought a knife, brother! Don’t you trust me?”

Dagur bent and yanked the knife out of Hiccup’s boot. He weighed it, turning it over his fingers. If he licked it, Hiccup thought—but Dagur just laughed, long and loud, and pitched the knife into the water. The knife turned, the clouds too thick for light to shine off the metal, and then it was gone. Hiccup watched it go.

“You won’t need that anyway,” Dagur said kindly. His eyes narrowed. He turned, like a wolf, on his men. “ _Why are his hands still tied!_ ”

That blade came down between Hiccup’s wrists. He held very still; the iron was cold, and it was sharp. The bindings snapped. He made to swing his arms forward; they came on their own. Then his shoulders locked. Too long held in one position, now asked to assume another, the muscles running through his upper arms, along the joints, and across his shoulders flared white-hot. His breath stuck in his throat. 

Dagur slung his arm around Hiccup’s shoulders and bore him forward.

“I want you to know, Hiccup,” Dagur said, “that I forgive you for what you did to me.”

“What I did to you?” Hiccup repeated. Agonizingly, he’d got his hands in front of him. The skin was blue indeed, and chapped. Blood spotted the backs of his knuckles. “What did I do to you?”

Dagur’s hand tightened around Hiccup’s nape. He led him inexorably on to the steps leading down. The great iron grill set over the hold was covered with a black cloth, nailed down so that the wind could not blow up the sides. The ring of ships, Hiccup thought. 

“Abandoned me,” Dagur said. “Left me to Alvin. Me! Your brother!”

“You aren’t my brother,” Hiccup said. He tucked his hands into his armpits. “You tried to kill my dad—me—Toothless—”

He waved as they descended. “Bygones. But you—” Dagur moved, shoving Hiccup against the wall. The man in the stairwell stepped aside. 

Dagur’s teeth flashed. He’d a rash on his face, red and hot around his tattoo. 

“You took my army from me!”

“The Outcasts follow Alvin,” Hiccup wheezed. His hands were too stiff to fend Dagur off; too useless. “By Viking law—”

Dagur shoved him again. The back of Hiccup’s head smashed against the wall. He clenched his teeth, fighting the stars. It would have been a weak argument anyway. Viking law did not traditionally apply to Outcasts, and the peace between Berk and Alvin was new yet. Dagur’s hands were dry on Hiccup’s throat. His palms rasped oddly, as if he’d a rash there too.

“You took,” Dagur said, like a child with a broken toy, “my _tribe_ from me. I’m the chief of the Berserkers. _I_ am! By _law_!”

“You broke the peace,” Hiccup managed. “You suborned another tribe. You—abducted the chief of Berk—”

Dagur leaned near, his lips pulled back and his teeth wide and white. He was the same boy he’d always been, the boy who had held Hiccup’s head under the water and laughed as he did it. Hiccup, fighting against Dagur, watching the air coming out his own mouth as bubbles, had heard Dagur’s laughter distorted and joyful through the water. The twins hadn’t seemed so bad after Dagur. At least they were satisfied with pantsing Hiccup in the village square.

“And now,” Dagur snarled, “they say my sister is chief. Stupid, boring _Gerda_ the _Giggly_. Gerda the _Goody-Goody_. Gerda the _Goblin-Snot_.”

His head pounded. Gerda. She’d been a gangly girl with a tendency to stutter. The one time she’d played with Hiccup, Dagur had screamed at her till she cried. “She’s so annoying,” he’d said companionably to Hiccup after, “one day I’m going to smother her with a pillow. Won’t it be funny? She’ll go purple.”

Hiccup wanted to look Dagur in the face and say, “She’s a better chief than you,” and see how purple Dagur would go. He wanted Dagur to choke on it, the knowledge that the little sister he’d ostracized, forbidden from playing with Dagur and Hiccup, was chief of the Berserkers and Dagur nothing more than Oswald the Agreeable’s great failure. If he goaded Dagur, Hiccup thought, Dagur would kill him.

“What did your men do to Toothless?” Hiccup gasped instead.

The hands at his throat eased. Dagur smiled, puzzled. A flake of snow darted between them to dash against Hiccup’s cheek and melt there.

“Toothless?”

“My dragon! You tried to take him from me—”

Dagur’s face cleared. He laughed again. “That thing? Why would I want it?” He cuffed Hiccup and dragged him the last few steps, hauling him by the neck as though Hiccup were the kitten the guard had called him. “Why would you, brother? When I’ve caught you this?”

He kicked the door open; the hinges groaned. Dagur tossed Hiccup into the hold. He fell forward, hands tucked to his belly, and landed painfully on one knee. A thin swath of light, coming through the doorway at his back, penetrated the darkness cast and enforced by the cloth nailed across the grill overhead. In that blackness, a shadow moved, a large one, and terrible. Hot air washed over Hiccup. It stung his skin.

“Bring a light!” Dagur shouted up the steps. He turned eagerly to Hiccup. “Do you like it? I call it the Pox Dagura!”

“Pox,” said Hiccup. “Pox?”

The dragon shifted again, as one of Dagur’s men handed him the lit lamp. Hiccup froze, staring into the creature’s face. The shape of the jaw was crooked, the eyes huge and red, teeth a gnarled mess jutting out of that crooked jaw; but the eruptions in its skin, the patchwork wetness of its scales, that was what held Hiccup there. Boils had burst all over it, and as the dragon, chained around the throat and the ankles, made to rise, a rotted glop broke from its belly to spill thickly across the floor. The beast was too large to stand. It collapsed again. 

“What—” He clapped a hand over his mouth.

Dreamily Dagur said, “Your Night Fury spits white fire. My Skrill, that _you took from me!_ ” He kicked Hiccup low in the back. “It spat lightning. But the Pox Dagura—oh, my brother! It’s wonderful! It spits plague, and death.”

“Quarantine,” Hiccup said to his palm. “That’s a quarantine ring outside.” He snapped his head up, too quickly. The rash on Dagur’s face, the rash on his hands—the guard who had scratched at his arms—  
“You’re infected—”

Dagur gazed down at Hiccup, as though from a great height. He touched his fingers briefly to his cheek, his nails at the edge of the rash.

“I burn, brother,” he said, “but it is _holy_. And like the gods, I will take back what is rightfully mine. That’s why I brought you here, Hiccup. Because I’ve forgiven you. You’ll train it for me, so I can remind Gerda the _Groveling Guppy_ why she’s supposed to stay in her room when I’m playing.”

“You’re insane,” Hiccup said. 

But he thought then, as he’d thought before, that whatever Dagur was insane was not the word for it. There was a cold thing inside of Dagur that found it useful to be considered deranged. The cold thing was there when Dagur smiled.

“And if you don’t help me, brother,” Dagur said, “my brother, then I will set the dragon free. That’s what you like. Free all the dragons. So I’ll do it for you. Just for you. I’ll set it free on Berk.”

Hiccup stared up at Dagur. Still smiling, Dagur set the lamp on the floor next to Hiccup’s knee. The dragon moaned.

“I’m sorry about your hands,” Dagur said. He swung the door shut behind him. Hiccup heard Dagur calling for a guard. He heard the dragon, breathing, and wetly, as though it hurt to do so.

Oh, Freyja, Hiccup thought, oh, goddess; and he thought not of Freyja, goddess of the battle, but Astrid. Hiccup folded his hands into his armpits again, though the heat of the small lamp tempted; if he did have frostbite, the dry heat would worsen the damage to his skin. His coat was heavy and cold, wet with the sea. He darted a look at the dragon: it had closed its eyes and laid down its head. Its snout gleamed, slick with something. A blister covered much of the left flank, and when the dragon inhaled, the blister shuddered. Dagur’s palms had born a rash, not blisters. 

The dragon opened an eye. Blood swam across the lens. It stared at Hiccup and then the third lid slid down; the rest followed. The heavy iron locked around the dragon’s throat was rusted red, not with rust but blood, dragon’s blood. He didn’t know what sort of dragon this was: not one of the species common to the archipelago; built on thicker lines than a Nightmare but longer and sleeker than a Gronkle. That mangled jaw with its spindle of teeth jutting out at contrary angles, and erratic stretches with no teeth at all: that would be the result of a bad break healed poorly.

“You almost didn’t survive that,” Hiccup said softly. “Did you?”

The dragon’s eye cracked open again. Its jaw moved, horribly, and it breathed hot, moist air. That rotted stench spilled out of the dragon’s throat, a smell of putrefaction. Hiccup pressed his face into the crook of his elbow. His eyes swam. Considering the cast of the dragon’s jaw, he thought again of Toothless. Better that he would have come down over land than sea. At that height, the water would have been like stone; he could easily have broken a leg or a wing and drowned. Trees and rocks could break a leg or a wing just as water might, but on land at least Toothless would have a chance. Not drowned, Hiccup prayed to Hlin. Please find him, thinking still of Astrid. 

In small, excruciating increments, the feeling returned to Hiccup’s hands. He bit his lips, curled in between his teeth, and exhaled through his nose to keep from crying out. He folded his fingers, so slowly, and then unfolded them. Just frostnip, if Ullr was kind. His skin burned, as though he’d stuck his hands in a fire. Again, Hiccup flexed his fingers. Pain, mostly, but any sensation meant the nerves were there. Hiccup fisted his hands and pressed the knuckles to his face. 

Over his fists, he looked at the dragon. It took up most of the cargo hold, though Dagur’s men had posted the chains to the back so that it could not move closer to the door. But for the lamp Dagur had left Hiccup, the dragon had no light. It had no air, but for what came in under the cloth over the grill. No food, either, or water, though Hiccup wondered how well it could eat with its jaw smashed like that.

Fumbling with hands still half-frozen, Hiccup got his wet coat open. The coldness of it stung his fingers. He shrugged out of the coat. That wet, with a winter storm now on them, it would only freeze. He picked up the lamp by its handle and stood. The lamp swayed, casting light up the dragon’s face and then back down to Hiccup’s feet. A shiver ran through Hiccup; another. His teeth chattered. He tried to hold the lamp steady but his wrist was too weak yet. He set the lamp down again.

When he lifted his head, the dragon was looking at him, both its eyes open. No: all of its eyes. It had a second, smaller pair set higher up on its angular head, but those eyes were clouded over; blind. 

“Hey,” Hiccup said. He took a small step toward the dragon and held his hand, shaking with cold, out to it, fingers down, the back of his wrist tipped up. “I’m not going to hurt you. I’m not like him. I don’t want to use you. Will you let me help you?” His eyes were low. He spoke evenly, in a quiet voice.

In the thin light of the lamp, the dragon studied Hiccup as he had studied it, with its eyes both blind and diseased. 

“You’re really sick, aren’t you?” Hiccup crept closer, still offering his hand. His heart was jittering. “Really sick. And I bet you’re scared. They shouldn’t have tied you up like this.”

He brought his other hand forward, too. So close, even with that great chain that ran from the collar to the back of the hold, if the dragon chose it could lunge for him. Mangled or not, that jaw, bigger around than two of Hiccup, could still crush him.

“You don’t have to be afraid of me,” he said.

The dragon’s third lids slid down, the right, then the left. The left lid rose again but the right, gummed up with pus, stuck. The dragon sighed long, breath heated, foul with rot.

Hiccup rested the fingers of his left hand beneath the right nostril. That snout was slick, sticky, and his hand burned, too sensitive from the frost. Swallowing his breath, Hiccup rested his palm there, too.

“It’s all right,” he said. He set his right hand beneath the left nostril, allowing the dragon to smell him. “I’m a friend.”

The lamp flickered. That second eye closed, and the dragon turned, pressing its snout against Hiccup’s hands. He petted it there in the fetid, dark hold of Dagur’s ship, and he thought of Toothless, black against the blue sky, and Astrid waiting for Hiccup at the academy, and, not wanting to think of this, how Dagur had laughed as he pushed Hiccup’s head under the water.

*

Astrid looked up at the rushing sound of an approaching dragon: the twins, at last. The necks of the Zippleback had crossed, and Barf and Belch were snapping at each other. The dragon soared out beyond the daughter island and circled around again. The twins were shouting at one another. Fishlegs, in the air on Meatlug and signaling for them to land, looked pained. He’d looked pained before, too, when Astrid had set her foot down on the plan and refused to hear any more arguments.

Snotlout had vacated the debate early on, declaring that whatever Astrid decided, he was in, and then he’d taken Hookfang to the far side of the clearing where Hookfang could teeth on trees in relative peace.

“Well, I’m sorry, Hookfang,” he was saying, his voice carrying on the wind, “but it’s not my fault your teeth fall out in the fall.”

Stuffing the bowl and spoon into Hiccup’s satchel, Astrid swung the strap over her head so it laid crossways over her chest. The pouch thumped her hip. She patted Stormfly absently on the flank as she walked past her, and Stormfly warbled. Astrid smiled over her shoulder at Stormfly.

“Don’t worry, girl,” she said. She held her hand back to Stormfly, and Stormfly nuzzled her knuckles, butting Astrid’s palm so that she stroked Stormfly again. Astrid’s smile faded at the corners. She forced it up again. “Everything’s going to be fine.”

Toothless had taken a position on top of one of the higher trees ringing the pond. His tail curled through the branches; the red tail fin flashed, hidden amongst the fir needles. With his black pupils slitted and his flaps sleeked back, shoulders tensed and wings flat, he looked like a mountain cat from the far off mainland. Crossing the little clearing to stand at his tree, Astrid thought of how horrid he’d seemed to her two years gone, when he’d dropped her in a tree and then settled on top of it while she hung desperately from a branch. Now, she looked up at him and saw his jaw twisting, his claws digging into wood and then digging again, shredding the tree trunk. 

“I’m worried too,” she called up to Toothless.

He tipped his head and whined at her. His teeth were out. He fanned his wings and crawled around the tree. The trunk splintered, and Toothless hopped to the next tree over as his first perch broke free, tumbling into the woods. Branches snapped. A flock of birds, in hiding from the dragons, panicked.

“Um, guys,” Fishlegs said, high-pitched, “not a good idea!”

The telltale sick-sweet scent of Zippleback gas, wind-blown, caught Astrid across the face. She turned sharply to see Barf, head turned upside-down and Ruffnut dangling from his neck, spitting gas at Tuffnut. 

“Do it!” Ruffnut yelled. “C’mon! Chicken-gut! Hel’s _man!_ ”

“All right,” Tuffnut shouted, red-faced and nearly steaming in the cold, “that’s _it_! Belch—” He needn’t have said anything: Belch was already opening his mouth. Small sparks went off in his throat.

Astrid took two running steps toward them, in motion before she’d a plan of action. Fury, clean and cold as the wind, that was what propelled her. Then Toothless leapt out of the tree and flashed over Astrid, knocking her into a too-wide stride that had her stumbling. She threw her hands out before her, caught her fingers in the grass, and pushed up to her feet again. 

Grounded, unable to fly much higher, Toothless made do with roaring. He shouted at Barf and Belch, and though the twins had started taking punches at one another, their dragon recoiled. Barf snapped mutinously but he would not meet Toothless’ gaze. Belch, whose sparks could light that gas, just drooped. Tuffnut yelped and clutched at Belch’s throat as Belch dropped. The rest of the dragon followed. Tuffnut’s helmet slid down over his eyes.

“Hey!” Ruffnut said. 

Astrid slipped the satchel’s strap back over her head. Tuffnut was slipping his helmet back on his head, and Ruffnut was calling Toothless several rather rude names. Grasping the strap firmly with both hands, Astrid got between the dragon’s heads and then whacked first Ruffnut then Tuffnut with the satchel. The bowl and spoon thunked satisfyingly in the bag.

“What,” Astrid said, raising her voice as she went along, “do you two think you’re doing?”

Toothless snorted in agreement. 

“Why are you hitting me?” Tuffnut demanded, fixing his helmet again. “ _She_ started it!” 

He pointed at Ruffnut as she pointed at Tuffnut and said, “That idiot’s the one who wouldn’t shut up!”

“You’re both going to shut up right now,” Astrid said, jabbing a finger at Tuffnut then Ruffnut, “or I’ll _finish_ it. Finding Hiccup is more important than whatever it is you guys are arguing about. So quit it!”

Tuffnut’s chin went down, and Ruffnut glanced first at Astrid then at him. The twins shared a look: Tuffnut’s mouth pinched, Ruffnut’s brow low, their eyes the same. Then Tuffnut set his jaw and looked away, and Ruffnut’s mouth pinched just as his had. A half hour ago they’d been happy enough to pool their talents for needling others and turn that reserve of annoying on Astrid. That mystery would wait.

“Sorry,” Ruffnut said to Astrid. “We won’t do it again.”

“Today,” Tuffnut muttered.

Ruffnut punched his shoulder, but it was only the usual sort of violence between them, and Tuffnut bore it without flinching. Grumbling, he dusted Belch’s head with his knuckles.

“Belch’s throat hurts anyway.”

Crossing his eyes upwards and tipping his head back to peer at Tuffnut, Belch crackled.

Tuffnut scowled and thumped Belch. “Don’t be a baby, you baby.”

Astrid eased her stance. “Good,” she said. “Because we need both of you.”

While Tuffnut fussed over Belch, Ruffnut grabbed something from the back of her saddle and tossed it to Astrid. Reacting swiftly at the sight of metal, and an edge, Astrid turned out of the way of the blade and caught the handle. 

“Figured you might need it,” Ruffnut said as Astrid adjusted her grip on the ax, one of the workman axes from the academy.

“You could have said what it was before you threw it at my head,” Astrid said dryly. Turning to Toothless, she hooked the ax in the catch-all saddlebag at the back of the saddle.

“That’s not as fun.” Ruffnut folded her arms over Barf’s head and leaned forward. “So, what are we doing anyway? Like, what’s the plan?”

Astrid fixed the satchel across her chest again. It was only a bag, leather from the tanner’s, a single buckle in the front to hold the flap down, the stitches used to fix the whole of it together somewhat clumsy. Hiccup had made it years ago and just gone on using it. The weight of what he’d packed into it—journals, several charcoal sticks, some rags, a few river stones and other little things of interest he’d found in the woods and stuffed in the bag and then forgot there—pulled the satchel’s strap tight between her breasts. She adjusted the strap and lifted her chin. The weight of the ax in her hand, that steadied her.

At her back, Toothless hummed: a deep, vibrating sound that revved in his chest and ended softly, as in a question. His breath warmed her ears; it puffed loose strands of her hair up, around her face. She carded them behind her ears again. He settled, close enough that when he breathed in, his jaw nudged her arm.

“We’re going to find Hiccup,” Astrid said, looking from one twin to the other and holding each gaze for a long moment so that both Ruffnut and Tuffnut understood precisely how serious this was, “and we’re going to rescue him.”

The twins looked at each other again, Ruffnut shrugging at the question in Tuffnut’s arching eyebrows. At least she’d found a way to unite them.

“That’s it?” said Tuffnut. He turned his raised eyebrows on Astrid. “That’s the plan?”

As a leader, Hiccup possessed certain qualities Astrid never would; he’d a talent for cobbling together an elaborate whole out of scraps and pieces. Astrid had little of that talent. What she had, instead, was something he had yet to really refine, and that was an absolute certainty in a course of action. So Astrid met Tuffnut’s raised eyebrows and Ruffnut’s sardonic shrug with her own brow narrow and her shoulders straight.

“And,” she said, with a lightness that underscored the stress she gave it, “we’re going to make whoever took him wish they had a seat in Valhalla.”

Ruffnut smiled slowly and wickedly; the corners of her mouth turned up and then in. Her long, thin nose pushed up at the end. She looked very much the devil Mildew had called her once in the village square, after she’d gassed his fields in retaliation for some comment or other he’d made about Barf and Belch.

“I like it,” Ruffnut said, giggling as she had in the square as Mildew went white with rage. “Can we go now?”

Belch, of course, had lit the gas that reduced Mildew’s last, meager autumn crop to ash, and it was Tuffnut Mildew had called a mad arson. Tuffnut had laughed, too, till Stoick had made the twins apologize to Mildew for destroying his property and damaging his livelihood. 

“Not that anyone really buys cabbage from Mildew,” Hiccup had whispered to Astrid.

She’d elbowed him, and Hiccup had clutched at his ribs, mock-cringing. 

“Not the point, Hiccup,” she’d said. 

He’d pouted at her, his thin lips so screwed up that he turned them out. She had to stick her nose up and turn her face away so he wouldn’t see her smiling and think she in any way condoned either arson or Hiccup trying to tease her like that, with his lips pursed and his eyes huge and soft and his eyelashes fanned out so she wanted to stick him in the side again before she did something worse, like kiss the tip of his nose. Her heart had jumped at that thought, and Astrid nearly did poke him.

Then Hiccup had relented. Considering the twins, forcefully shoving each other closer to the precipice of a public apology and to Mildew, Hiccup left off rubbing at his side. He sighed.

“They really shouldn’t have burned his field,” Hiccup had admitted.

Astrid had laughed then, low under her breath. She glanced sidelong at Hiccup and found he was glancing sidelong at her. Astrid raised a hand to hide her mouth and leaned down so that the few inches of height she still had on him were nothing. A flush went up his neck, skin going pink under his reddish-brown hair. The beating in her chest deepened and something shivery ran up her own throat.

She spoke into his ear: “It was pretty funny, though,” and Hiccup laughed out loud. She clapped her hand over his mouth when both Stoick and Mildew turned to them, and Hiccup twisted, hiding his face in her shoulder as she tried to smother the laugh in his mouth and he tried to bury it in her neck. His hair, unbrushed and tangled after his usual morning flight with Toothless, tickled her coarsely, and her heart had gone on jumping in her chest, so fiercely she thought he must have felt it and perhaps he laughed at her, too. She’d still wanted to kiss his nose.

“And why is the chief’s heir laughing at my misfortune?” Mildew demanded stridently. “I will have an apology at once—”

“I’m sorry,” Astrid called, inching away with her hand on Hiccup’s lips and her other arm thrown around his shoulders, “he swallowed a bug. I’m going to get him some water.”

“Nice save,” Hiccup had whispered into the crook of her shoulder, his breath warm on her morning-chilled skin. “That was really close. I almost lost my dignity. Good thing I _swallowed a bug_.”

“Shut up and start choking,” she’d hissed back, and that had set him off again.

The memory struck her full in the chest, as brutal as any blow to the breastbone. Her throat tensed. The ugly, doubting thing inside her said: If he’s dead. If he’s gone. If we don’t find him. All this shot through her, swift as an arrow, there and gone again. Toothless nudged her shoulder with his snout. She touched her hand to the underside of his jaw. His green eye had turned down to her. Gently he exhaled across her face. Coming now up on her other side, Stormfly trilled and rifled at Astrid’s hair, drawing the braid out to chew on it.

“Cool,” Tuffnut said, slamming his fist into the open palm of his other hand. “I’m totally in.”

Astrid pulled her braid free of Stormfly’s beak. She offered a long scratch along Stormfly’s cheek in exchange for her hair, and Stormfly twittered again, bumping her cheek into Astrid’s hand. With gloves on, she couldn’t get her nails in under Stormfly’s scales. Stormfly bumped Astrid again, sidestepping to lean against her.

“Sorry, Stormfly,” Astrid said. She patted Stormfly with finality. “It’ll have to be later.” She turned to look over her outstretched arm, hand resting beneath Stormfly’s eye. “Snotlout! Get ready. We’re leaving now. We need to beat that storm before it gets here.”

Stormfly bounced, rocking from one foot to the other. All the nervous energy of the day bubbled in her, and she fluttered her wings, batting at Astrid in her eagerness. Astrid held both her hands up to Stormfly and caught her jaw. She slid her palms up to cradle the flattened pouch in Stormfly’s throat. Tipping her head to one side to eye Astrid, Stormfly warbled a question.

“You’re not going with us, girl,” Astrid said. She reached up to scratch Stormfly’s chin, forestalling a sharper complaint from her. If she’d no gloves, she could slide her nails in and give Stormfly the sort of scratching she deserved. If she’d no gloves, her hands would be blue. Astrid petted her, feeling only faintly through the wool of the gloves the ridging of Stormfly’s scales.

“I need you to do something really important for me. Okay? Can you do that for me? We’re going to play letters.”

At the prospect of a game, Stormfly brightened. Her head came up and she squawked.

Astrid fumbled with the satchel, pulling out one of Hiccup’s charcoal sticks and a journal. She flipped the cord-bound book open and scribbled a short message on the first blank page: _Hiccup’s missing. Toothless is fine. I’m taking twins, Snotlout, Fishlegs to look for Hiccup. Southwest of Sea’s Watch._ She signed her name, tore the paper from the book, and rolled it tightly. Binding it in one of the rags, she handed the message to Stormfly, who took it with her beak and then, tossing her head back, swallowed it into her pouch. 

Astrid leaned forward to touch the pouch again, her fingers light over the small bulge of the letter. Looking into Stormfly’s eye and holding her hand steady on her throat, Astrid said clearly, “Find Stoick.”

Stormfly chirped and then bent her knees; her wings tensed; she burst explosively into the air. Astrid stepped back and traced Stormfly’s progress as she made for the main island. From there, she’d trace Stoick to the harbor, from the harbor to the fishing boats out in the bay or at sea, just out of the protective curve of Berk.

“Ready when you are,” Snotlout said. He was quick to turn his gaze away. Hookfang gnashed his teeth and shook his head, rubbing his jaw in the dirt.

Glancing a last time after Stormfly, Astrid nodded. “Okay. Let’s go.” Getting her foot into the stirrup, she hopped up and swung on to Toothless’ back. He rolled his shoulders, adjusting to her weight and, she thought, how she planted her weight. The saddle Hiccup used was designed to allow him to lay flat on Toothless’ back, while Stormfly’s saddle had more of a seat to it, a necessary design given Stormfly’s thinner and shorter back. What it meant was Astrid had to shift her arse around to find something familiar in how to sit on Toothless.

He gave a short bark and Astrid hooked her left foot in the other stirrup, getting her boot fitted to the pedal. Hiccup’s satchel, she swung around so it rested at the small of her back.

“Let’s go find him,” Astrid said, and she hit the pedal. Toothless raced for the treeline and jumped, using one of the firs as a sort of launching pad. Astrid held on grimly to the saddle horn; her braid whipped behind her. Aloft, over the sprawling ocean, Toothless steadied. Astrid found the right position for the tail fin on the first try. 

“See?” She patted Toothless’ nape. “I’m catching on.”

Toothless turned his head up to blink at her, and Astrid smiled. 

“I know,” she said. “I’ll be happier when he’s riding you, too.”

Fishlegs drew even with Astrid. Meatlug, straining to hold pace with Toothless, was panting happily, tongue lolling. 

“I still say we should get Stoick ourselves,” Fishlegs called over the wind. “We have zero idea what we’re flying into here, and he is the chief.”

Astrid shook her head. Flyaway lengths of hair batted her cheeks and tangled in the corners of her mouth. The storm had quickened, the clouds thickening, darkening. The northern wind was at their back, granting them speed, but the velocity pushed at Astrid, as it pushed at all the riders.

“We might not have time to get Stoick,” Astrid shouted. “ _Because_ we don’t know who took him! And we don’t know what they want with him, but _everyone_ who tries to kidnap Hiccup always wants _something_ , and it’s never good!”

The twins rode Barf and Belch out in front of Fishlegs and Astrid; the Zippleback rose from beneath and then braced his wings to fall back. As Toothless passed them, Tuffnut shouted:

“I think you just want to rescue him!” He made exaggerated kissing noises, smacking his lips at Astrid. “‘Oh, Astrid, my _heeeeeroooo_.’”

Astrid spared a hand to flash him an obscene gesture. He laughed and then yelped. Ruffnut had smacked him.

“But someone did take him?” Ruffnut yelled.

“Scuffing in the bushes!” Astrid brushed the hair from her lips. Hauling her fur collar up was a loss. “Broken branches! And there were footprints on the old path leading down to the caves.” She had hoped, till she’d found that first cracked branch and, in the brush, the telltale signs of another person, that Hiccup had simply fallen; though she’d known from Toothless’ roaring, there in those thorned vines, that he was gone.

“Someone probably had a boat there,” Fishlegs added. “It’d be real easy to sneak a boat in when the tide’s low, just before sunrise. Then you just have to time it for when the tide’s high enough to ride it out again.”

“They were waiting for Hiccup,” Astrid said. Her mouth hardened. She lowered her face, chin pointed to her collar, as a concession to Toothless’ momentum and to tuck some of her face into the relative warmth of her collar. Her eyes were narrowed; she glared at the grey horizon. “They planned this.”

“Who would even want Hiccup that bad?” Snotlout asked; a poor joke. 

“Besides Astrid the hero?” Then Tuffnut yelped again.

“Well, Alvin’s supposed to be on our side now,” said Fishlegs hesitantly.

“I know _that_ ,” Snotlout sneered, “I was _there_. I helped _make it happen_. That’s what I’m all about. Bringing people together.”

“I have an idea,” Astrid said.

“So?” Ruffnut prompted when Astrid didn’t continue. “You want to let us know?”

“Yeah,” said Tuffnut, “give us the gossip.”

Astrid rocked her shoulder. She hadn’t said it to direct the conversation, but to cut it short. The old superstition held that to name a thing was to give it power, and she did not wish to name this. Perhaps if she kept it to herself, then it could not prove true. 

“We’re wasting time,” she snapped. Leaning forward, she pressed her chest flat against Toothless. He twisted beneath her, turning his eye to peer at her. 

“Come on,” she said. “Faster.”

Toothless showed her his teeth, a fierce grin, and he angled his wings to catch the wind. Like that, they rode the storm to sea, chasing the scent that would take them to Hiccup.

*

Hiccup had pulled his knees to his chest and then made a pillow of his arms around his legs. He had thought when Dagur’s man had cut the knot that held the gag in place, and pushed into the back of his head, what a relief to have that pressure gone. The relief had gone, too. The beating in his head worsened. Hiccup squeezed his eyes shut against it.

The rasp of the dragon’s breath scraped at him. He’d moved away from it, setting his back to the wall, near the door, before resting his head. The stench had overwhelmed. Now, it was only a thing that was there, steady as the pulsing in his skull or the shudder that ran through him again and again. The coat had soaked most of the spray but he’d worn it too long, and his thick tunic had caught damp as well. His stump ached in the bone and the skin under the cuff, clamped tightly over his trousers leg, felt clammy and cold. He ought to take the leg off, as wet skin meant blisters and blisters meant sores, but then he thought of Dagur.

Hiccup raised his head, just enough to squint at the dragon, sprawled along the back wall. Its mountainous side heaved. That blister marring its belly rolled and Hiccup swallowed and averted his eyes. The dragon was dying, here in the cold, dark hold of Dagur’s ship. Hiccup rubbed at the cuff of his prosthetic leg. If Hiccup didn’t change into dry clothes soon, he would too. He would have said this out loud but Astrid wasn’t there to sock his shoulder for making so inappropriate a joke.

“Why are you assuming I was joking?” Hiccup mumbled into his elbow. “I’m being very serious right now.”

He didn’t want to think of death. In the dark spaces behind his eyes he saw Toothless plummeting into the surf. Bones broke on the water from that height. If he did, somehow, escape a broken leg or wing then the weight of him, and a useless tail fin, would drag him down. Over the ocean, falling alone, he could not survive. 

“You’re churning again,” Astrid said. She would sit next to him in her usual manner, economically and taking care to nudge his arm with her elbow. She’d cross her legs and set her elbows on her knees and she’d look down on him, her eyebrow arched, as he huddled with his arms around his own knees.

He chomped his teeth to stop the chattering. Had a fever set in yet? Dagur’s hands were coarse with rash, and the dragon’s skin had blistered and broke to ooze, and Hiccup had lain unconscious at the bottom of that boat in the cold without either gloves or hat as the sea spat on him. What a wonderful array of choices, he thought.

In his head what he said to Astrid who wasn’t there was: “Yeah. Sorry for worrying about my best friend.”

The Astrid who wasn’t there pinched his arm so he’d jump and scowl at her. She’d say: “Don’t get mad at me.”

“I’m not mad at you!”

“You’re not snapping at anyone else.”

He hid his face in the sanctuary of his arms and knees. “I’m mad at myself. Okay? Does that make you happy?”

“Why would it?”

“Why do you always ask me so many questions?” he said, lifting his head to glare at her.

But of course Astrid wasn’t there. He stared at the space where she wasn’t sitting, legs crossed with her back to the wall, beside him and near enough so that if she swayed, she could nudge his shoulder with her own. He pressed his hand to his eyes. His forehead burned his palm, but then he was chilled through and through, so naturally his face would feel hot to him. He wished Astrid were there. He wished she would rest her shoulder against his shoulder. 

In the ice, those nearly two years gone, they had turned to one another. Astrid had held him. He had held Astrid. Her back had bent beneath his arm, and she’d set her hand so her fingers curled about his shoulder and the heel of her hand brushed his chest. Their hips had set together. She’d hooked her arm about his waist. When she tipped her head back to look at the sky, soft strands of her pale hair had tickled his cheek. He’d looked at the sky, too, but then he had looked at Astrid.

“Why do you push me?” he wanted to ask her, to push her in return. “What do you want from me? What is it, exactly, that you get out of this?”

Hiccup laughed and covered his face. He dragged the hair back from his eyes. How sad was it that even now some self-pitying thing still lived inside him? 

“I just gestured to all of me,” he muttered, and he scrubbed his hands over his face. His fingers twinged. Hiccup dropped his hands; the hair fell back across his brow. He blew it to the side. Astrid, he thought, would not just sit here and slowly freeze to death.

He looked over at the dragon. Long legs, thick around to bear that bulk over land; small wings, almost vestigial. Fishlegs would lose it if he’d the chance to catalogue it. The dragon’s breath had run hot. Hiccup drummed his fingers on his knees then clapped his hands to them.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay!”

He stood, wincing at the cuff chafing his stump through his trousers. 

“Hey,” he called to the dragon. 

The beast stirred, grumbling. It hadn’t done that before. The bloodied eyes opened again, but stayed lidded, and the dragon gazed coldly at him as if he were smaller than he had been when he’d stroked the dragon’s snout.

Hiccup held his hands out, palms down and fingers curled away, to pacify.

“It’s just me again,” he said. He dropped his eyes. “Plain old boring Hiccup. Your friend. Remember?” 

Those thick iron chains clattered. The groan of straining wood shot Hiccup, but he held still, his head tipped and his eyes on the floorboards and his hands offered to the dragon, like a nice snack. Another tremor shook him. Then the chains clinked, settling, and the dragon hummed. 

Very slowly, Hiccup raised his chin, and his head along with it, to find the dragon had laid its own head down on top of one leg, cocked so just the one gummied eye watched him. It puffed a breath. A white cloud of condensation fogged the air. Hiccup smiled, careful to keep his lips over his teeth.

“I like you, too,” he said. 

Hands out, he twisted sideways so as he walked toward the dragon, he stepped with his left side before his right. He crouched as he stepped, though his leg protested that, and he tucked his hands up under his tunic to peel it off. The damp fabric pulled at his hair. His back goosebumped; his skin tightened all over.

“Do you think,” he said, laying his tunic across the boards, “you could maybe—” He shrugged. “Dry that out for me?”

The dragon blinked. 

Hiccup rocked back on his feet, thinking. Toothless would have known at the first, but then, Toothless knew Hiccup. He would have air-dried Hiccup already, after chuckling at him. Hiccup’s chest clenched and he glanced away, looking across the dragon toward the far wall of the hold. The lamp, from its angle, threw the dragon’s shadow so that it covered half the ceiling and all the wall behind the beast. Hiccup twiddled three fingers then went to fetch the lamp.

“Like this,” he said, crouching again, nearer to the dragon. 

He blew over the open top of the lamp, so that the candle inside it flickered and warm air blew across the dragon’s cheek. The dragon startled, its head coming up. The chains rattled. Bracing the lamp on his fingertips to angle it, Hiccup repeated the trick, this time blowing the air over his tunic. He let the lamp go; it swung by its handle and then stilled, and he set it on the floorboards again.

The dragon studied Hiccup. Its jaw moved; that tangle of teeth split. It exhaled softly, hot in Hiccup’s face. Yes, he thought; he’d done it; and Hiccup grinned.

Then the dragon opened its mouth wide, hacked twice, and burped a fireball that spun out and struck the door. Whatever pride he’d felt burst, as neatly as a soap bubble. Hiccup shouted, grabbed his damp tunic, and lunged for the first flames licking eagerly at the wood. With his tunic held in front of him, he landed on top of the fire; his shoulder slammed the door. The fire snapped at him, and he snatched his coat up and beat at the flames, his coat smacking wetly. 

At last he’d won, and Hiccup collapsed, gasping. The acrid smoke mingled unpleasantly with the omnipresent stink of rot. He rolled away, clutching his cold coat to his warmed chest. After reflection, he tossed the coat away again. After more reflection, he felt for his tunic. It was dry enough, if smoky-smelling and a bit charred on the front of it.

“There were other ways to do that,” Hiccup said, yanking his tunic on. “Ways that maybe don’t involve setting the boat on fire. The boat we’re currently floating on. That’s keeping us from drowning.”

The dragon’s two eyes blinked, one and then, after a long moment, the other. A whistling noise, high-pitched and jarring, escaped its nose. He didn’t know this dragon: its species, its temperament.

“But I know when someone’s laughing at me,” Hiccup told it. “Believe me. If anyone has the experience and know-how necessary to tell when they’re being laughed at, it’s me.”

The dragon whistled again and set its head on its leg. Brushing at the traces of ash marking his tunic, Hiccup considered the Pox. Already the humor faded from it. Its eyes dripped, lids lowering. That second time it whistled, a pocket of blood had burst out its right nostril, staining the bared skin—devoid of scales—around its mouth. The skin there was irritated. Hiccup wiped at his own nose, thinking of how his lips chapped in winter and how cleaning the snot dripping out his nose so many times throughout the day left his nose and mouth raw. His father kept a pot of fatty ointment to tend to burns like that. Before Dagur’s men had chained the dragon’s legs, it would have scratched at its face to stop the hurting, like Hiccup licking his chapped lips only to make it worse.

“Thank you,” Hiccup said. 

The Pox exhaled another white cloud and then closed its eyes. Knocking his metal foot as he drew near, so that the dragon would know his advance, Hiccup settled on the floor beside it. He pulled his sleeve down over his hand, and using this as a kerchief, he dabbed at the blood on the end of the dragon’s snout. The dragon sighed. What he needed to do, Hiccup thought, was air the hold out, to clean away the sick air and the fresh addition of smoke. 

“One winter,” Hiccup said to the dragon, “when I was seven, or—well, the point is, I was little. I got sick. I mean, really sick. My dad was sacrificing sheep to basically every god we Vikings have ever heard of. That kind of sick.” Stoick had asked Gothi for a talisman, a stone engraved with a prayer to Eir, the minor goddess who served Frigg as a healer. She’d made this and advised Stoick to place Eir’s white flowers in a pouch to set beneath Hiccup’s pillow. “I had to wear it for two years! That’s how bad it was. Or how freaked out my dad was, anyway.” 

He still had that talisman, and the length of leather he’d worn it with, stashed in the drawer beneath his bed. The flowers had rotted, their petals going brown and curling. 

When he’d been at his sickest, Hiccup had held the stone in his hand, so tightly he’d thought the runes might cut into his palm, and he had thought not of Eir, or of Frigg, but of his father, and how large and how steady his father’s hand was when he brushed the hair from Hiccup’s fever-sticky forehead, and the heavy warmth of his father’s voice that long and awful night Hiccup hadn’t been able to sleep his skin had burned so. He had lain awake in the dark, sweltering beneath the blankets layered upon him to sweat the fever out. Stoick had prayed to the gods to spare his son, Valka’s son, their child. His voice had risen in the night up the stairs to Hiccup’s loft room. He’d worn the talisman after the fever passed not because of any fear his father bore that it would return, but because Hiccup had found a comfort in the weight of that stone and the memory of his father praying for him not out of duty but out of love.

Hiccup touched his throat absently. His fingers were cold and heavy, and his throat had an itch inside it. He wore nothing about his neck. 

That was the winter his grandfather had died of fever: his mother’s father, the father she shared with Spitelout. They’d buried Gramps while Hiccup burned in his bed. He hadn’t known till his own fever broke and Stoick told him. Hiccup had never been close to Snotlout. First it was that Snotlout was so much younger than him. Then it was that even younger, Snotlout showed greater promise, in the Viking way. Snotlout was there when Gramps was buried. Hiccup was not. By tradition, Snotlout had to help break the frozen earth, to make the grave. After Stoick told him, Hiccup had sat in his room, trying to remember everything he had ever known of his grandfather, the man who had raised Hiccup’s mother. When he saw Snotlout again, Snotlout had called him useless. Good for nothing but sleeping in bed.

Eight, Hiccup thought. He had been eight, and Snotlout six.

“Anyway,” he said. “When the fever did finally break, Dad opened all the windows in the house to get the fever air out and good, fresh air in. I almost froze to death from _that_ ,” Hiccup said, “but I didn’t, so it must have worked.”

He petted the Pox’s nose and then grimaced. His sleeve had darkened at the end with the blood. Shaking that sleeve, he stood again and took up the lamp. The grill was beyond him. He couldn’t reach the covering, and even if he could—if the dragon allowed him to climb up its back—someone would notice if he cut holes in that cloth. He turned on his heel, casting the lamp’s light around the hold. There were four portholes, two on each side, boarded up. 

“Well,” Hiccup said, “it’s not going to be _pleasant_. But you do breathe fire, so maybe it won’t be too bad. We can just set my new high-end coat on fire and hope Astrid gets here before the boat catches fire too.”

Neither Dagur nor his men had thought to check Hiccup’s prosthetic leg for compartments in the wood. After all, who would think to look at a man’s peg leg for tools?

“Firstly,” Gobber had said when Hiccup proposed the addition of a storage space, “what’s this ‘man’ business about, eh?”

“What, you think—you think I’m not a man?” Hiccup puffed his chest up, his arms too. “Manliness—courses through me!”

“If you’re going to be sick out your butt,” Gobber said, gesturing with his hammer hand, “I’d prefer you do it outside my smithy, and in the snow like a proper civilized man.”

“A-ha!” Hiccup pointed triumphantly at Gobber. “So you admit I’m a man.”

“I admit I don’t want you getting your manliness all over my clean floor,” Gobber said. 

Together they’d considered the floor, strewn with dust and straw and cast-off bits of metal and there, in the corner, a mouse fast asleep in its bed of purloined rags.

“Brave beastie,” Gobber tsked, “doing that right where I can see it. Besides, are you sure you’d want to carry around that extra weight?” He knocked his own peg leg against the floor.

“The leg already runs light as it is,” Hiccup said, hoisting his leg up and grasping the foot in his hand. “Since I switched to the bismuth alloy—”

“Which I still say is a poor choice, with the winters being what they are.”

“Which is _why_ I blended it with the iron,” Hiccup countered. “The point I’m trying to make, if you’d let me finish—” 

“Oh, by all means, my lord.” Gobber sketched a bow.

Hiccup had made a face at him. “I can get away with adding a little extra weight to the leg. It evens out.”

He’d won that argument in the end, the coup de grace consisting of Hiccup swinging through Gobber’s rotating selection of hand-attachments and pointing silently to the great, and monumentally heavy, spiked mace that Hiccup knew for a fact threw Gobber’s shoulder out of joint whenever he used it. Gobber had muttered “Och!” under his breath and then fussed with his mustache, refusing to concede but conceding regardless.

Hiccup put the lamp down and stooped to feel for the seam in the wood that, if he pressed it at the right spot a half-inch up from the bottom of the wood, would pop the compartment open. He’d a very small pry-bar in there that he thought he could use to pull out the nails holding the boards over those portholes. His fingers skimmed the crease. There.

Rushed footsteps sounded outside the door. Hiccup straightened, nearly overbalancing onto his backside. The door was flung open, and Dagur stormed in. The smell of fresh smoke stopped him. His head turned. 

“What,” said Dagur, sniffing the air, “are you playing at down here?”

He took two long steps into the room and kicked the door closed. The bang of it stirred the Pox. Dagur feigned a kick at the dragon and then, as the dragon recoiled, ignored it.

“Playing?” Hiccup turned as Dagur paced, so that he faced him. “Who’s playing? I’m not playing. I’m training this dragon, just like you asked.” His hands had come up between them, warding.

Dagur drew a noisy breath in through his nose and mouth. His chin came down. He smiled.

“I smell smoke. Your guard tells me he saw fire under the door.”

He stepped toward Hiccup. Hiccup stepped back, angling so his back was to the dragon. Dagur stalked him across the hold.

“All of which is perfectly explainable,” Hiccup said. “You see, if you want to train a dragon, first you have to know what the dragon can do—”

Dagur’s boots scuffed the floorboards. In the flickering light of the lamp, left to burn away where Hiccup had set it beneath the first porthole, Dagur was thin and tall and strangely made. The rash distorted more than Hiccup, disoriented, had seen when Dagur had smashed him against the wall outside the hold. The skin of his lips peeled. He flaked; his skin shed.

“Or maybe,” Dagur said, “you were trying to escape. Trying to _cut me down_.”

“Why—why would I want to escape?” Hiccup stumbled against the dragon’s head. The Pox’s breath warmed his back. “You said you’d turn the dragon on Berk if I didn’t help you.”

Dagur laughed, without his usual carrying on. The shortness of it ran along Hiccup’s spine. His breath hitched.

“Because you have no loyalty, brother,” Dagur said. His eyes gleamed. Fever, Hiccup thought. “You were going to burn my fleet, and steal my dragon—mine!”

“It can’t fly!” Hiccup blurted. He spun, throwing his hand back to gesture to those wings. “Its wings aren’t—they’re not big enough to carry it. They’re probably just for short distances, like hopping over logs or—whatever.”

Dagur cuffed Hiccup’s ear; he’d presented Dagur with his back and with it an opening. Hiccup staggered, landing brutally on his bad knee. The ache in his stump flared into something sharp, like a blade pushed into the bone.

“I shouldn’t be surprised,” Dagur said from above him. “You always lacked moral fiber. It’s my fault I didn’t see it sooner. You’re as weak as my sister.” As an afterthought, he kicked Hiccup in the side. 

Hiccup anticipated the blow; he rocked with it. The Pox’s leg held him up. He went limp. It was the old trick for bullies. Play dead so they lose interest. He was tired of death.

“You’re right,” Hiccup said. He dared a glance at Dagur. “I couldn’t have found this dragon. And I’ve never seen one like it.”

“Of course you haven’t,” Dagur sneered, but the harshness of his features had calmed some. He did treasure his ego. “See how generous I am, brother? Bringing you dragons you’ve never seen before.”

Meekly, Hiccup lowered his eyes. “Where _did_ you find it?”

Dagur reacted with scorn. “As if I’d tell _you_. Dragon hoarder. You have to keep them all to yourself, don’t you? On your worthless island.”

“How could I hoard the Pox?” Hiccup asked. He threw his arms wide, encompassing the hold. “When you have me so effectively locked up? Face it, Dagur. I’m your prisoner. There’s nothing I can do to stop you.”

Pleased, Dagur smirked. “But you do love drowning, brother.”

That was always you, Hiccup did not say. Instead he made a show of his meekness, of submission: his head hanging, his eyes peeking from under his bangs, his palms up. 

“But if I knew what kind of environment you found it in,” he said, “where it lives, I could use that knowledge to train it for you. Every species is different. Anything you can remember about finding it and capturing it…” He made a point of mimicking awe, as though he were astonished that anyone could have captured such a beast.

“Lay it on a little thicker,” he imagined Astrid saying, “and see if he falls over under it.”

Rather, Dagur swelled beneath the praise. His thinness was no trick of the meager light, but a consequence of a prolonged illness, or perhaps the time he had spent in custody with the Outcasts. When he pushed his chest out and squared his shoulders like that, it only accentuated how much he had lost over the long months since their last encounter.

“I found it in the south,” he said with relish. His hollowed face shone. “My grandfather—and he was a real Berserker, not like my soft, coward father—he kept a record of his conquests. I just had to track the dragon. And oh! How it fought! But I was stronger! I _am_ stronger!”

Dagur lashed out. Hiccup curled, but he was not Dagur’s target. The dragon screamed and jerked back, pulling at its chains. The collar held it, the lead too short to allow it to escape Dagur or his curving knife. It snorted blood in its panic, and Hiccup moved without thought, scrabbling for Dagur’s arm.

“Stop it!”

His fingers were slow; they curved weakly. Still, he tried to get at Dagur’s eyes. Dagur knocked Hiccup down with a single lashing of his arm. Thin he may have grown, but Dagur remained larger than Hiccup; he would always be the larger. Staring remotely at Hiccup, he lowered the blade so that the reddened tip of it was even with the end of Hiccup’s nose. If there had ever been kindness in Dagur, Hiccup had never known it.

All he saw in Dagur now was that powerful nothingness. Hiccup watched the point of the blade rather than the thing in Dagur’s eyes. A drop of blood beaded at the end of the knife and then dropped. It landed hot on Hiccup’s chilled cheek.

“You,” said Dagur, “do not command me. Brother.”

Hiccup spoke evenly. “If you keep hurting it like this, the dragon will never trust you.”

Dagur curled his lip. “I don’t want its trust. I want its obedience.”

“A dragon won’t obey someone it won’t trust.”

Dagur did laugh then, as he most enjoyed laughing. The dragon moaned, a very little sound, like the wind trapped in a seashell, and Dagur struck at it again. Perhaps the dragon dwarfed Dagur, but he had made himself larger than that too.

“You trust me,” Dagur said lightly. His smile was for the Pox.

Hiccup did trust Dagur. He trusted Dagur to do what it was Dagur best did. We should have held him on Berk, Hiccup thought. They should have killed him. That thought roosted in Hiccup’s gut, crushing it. 

Dagur wiped the blade off on his sleeve. “Oh. I meant to tell you. We’re lifting anchor.”

Hiccup snapped up. “Why? I mean, what’s the rush?”

“As if your blonde girlie won’t come chasing after you.” Dagur popped his tongue in revulsion. The noise lingered lewdly. “Can’t live without your precious fishbone.” And he howled at that joke. Heedless of the knife, he clapped his hands together. 

“Shut up,” Hiccup said. His ears roared. The dragon, quivering, cracked its eye. “Astrid is—f-five times the warrior you’ll ever be.” Rage tripped his tongue.

Dagur might have hit him across the face for that. He chose not to do so.

“And if you don’t get my dragon ready for my glorious homecoming,” Dagur said, “she’ll be as dead as every other warrior on Berk. That’s what you deserve anyway.”

He made to leave.

“How many of your men have already died?” Hiccup asked Dagur’s back.

Dagur shrugged a shoulder. “Seven. They just weren’t strong enough. Good riddance, right, brother? If you can’t handle the heat, then stay out of my beautiful new world.”

“The kitchen,” Hiccup called after him, but Dagur’s laughter drowned him out. The door slammed. The candle in the lamp guttered.

Hiccup cradled his head. His brow burned. A shudder passed through him, like an ill wind off a grave. Seven men dead. Why had he asked? The voice wasn’t Astrid’s but his own voice, in his own head. Out of fear for Berk. No. He had wanted to hurt Dagur with the deaths of men, men who might have broken with their oath to their chief and followed Dagur but nevertheless men who had lived and deserved better than to be used like dirt pitched into someone’s face. Dagur was unhurt. His men were still dead. Hiccup’s cold hands were a balm to the heat of his face.

The Pox moved. Its breath gusted, ruffling his hair. Hiccup slid his hands down, cupping his chin. The dragon, blood clotting thinly where Dagur had gashed it, blew warm air into Hiccup’s face. He coughed, eyes watering; the rot stink thickened. But he smiled, teeth hidden, and gave the dragon his palm to smell.

“Thanks,” Hiccup said. He stroked the dragon’s swollen chin, minding the snarl of teeth jutting at contrary angles. “I’m sorry I didn’t stop him.”

The Pox only sighed and sank so its chains laxed and it could breathe easier for a time. It labored even without the collar choking it.

Astrid would come. She would come.

“We just have to survive,” he said. “All right? Can you do that for me?”

Delicately for so large a beast, the Pox pressed its chin to his hand.

“All right,” Hiccup said. “Good plague dragon. You’re not even why Dagur and his guys are so sick. Are you?” He was thinking of the dragon’s wetness and the dry flaking of Dagur’s skin.

“Just have to survive,” he echoed. Hiccup gave the dragon another quick smile, though how much of his reassurance translated, he couldn’t say. Enough, he hoped.

“Now what do you say I crack open one of those portholes and get you some fresh air while you dry my coat out?” He grimaced at the stiffness in his knees when he stood. His father’s knees were meant to ache like that, not his own. 

He plucked the coat up with his fingertips rather than hang it over his now mostly dry tunic sleeve.

“Gently this time.” He prattled on to fill the silences. Astrid liked to tease him for the habit. He shook the coat out. “I don’t want to see Dagur again any more than you do.”

Make her fast, Hiccup prayed. He gave it up to any god who would listen.

*

The winter squall overtook them. What light the day held passed into the grey twilight of a coming snow. Astrid hitched her fur collar up to her ears and burrowed into that little warmth. Ruffnut had brought her an ax, though not her own; she would have preferred a thick wool hat like Ruffnut’s, when the snow at last started. The snow came silently, in a thick rush all at once, as though Odin had turned over his huge bathtub to shake out the soap suds.

Astrid rubbed Toothless’ head and he hummed at her. The cold never seemed to bother him much, not as it bothered Stormfly. She’d assured the rest of the teens that Stormfly would find Stoick and he’d find them in turn. Only privately did Astrid allow the uncertainty that hope needed.

“She’ll get the chief,” Astrid said quietly into her collar. She didn’t want the others to hear her. “We _will_ find Hiccup.”

Toothless vibrated beneath her; he’d heard. She thought perhaps he tracked by sound as well as smell, though how he could do that she wasn’t certain. That was a question for Fishlegs, and for Hiccup who knew Toothless best. Stormfly used scent and sight, and Astrid had become attuned to her means of tracking, so much so that she understood when Stormfly chased a lost trail to pick it up again and when she neared their quarry. As Toothless navigated, Astrid adjusting the tail fin as needed, the flaps ringing his head trembled; they fanned out or sleeked, and they shivered regularly. Could he hear Hiccup, somewhere out there? 

A strange, hollow thing sat in Astrid’s chest. Silly, to envy a dragon. Sillier, to envy someone else who—cared for Hiccup. She rested her hand on Toothless’ nape in apology. 

All around them the snow fell, thick, wet flurries that plopped and melted slowly. A few flakes dotted her gloved hands and stayed there, their fluffed edges gradually softening as the heat of her skin, muffled by the wool, touched them. Astrid turned her face up to the clouds. A snowflake struck her cheek, just high of the cut she’d got, now scabbed. Another dotted her mouth. Far below the sea was dark, a blue so deep it had gone to grey. Berk had faded off the horizon, and for the time being all the world was just that: the dark sea, the dark sky, each stretching endlessly on, and the snow whitely filling the spaces between. 

When this was over, she thought, she wanted to show this to Hiccup as he had once shown her the vastness of the sky, so much greater than she had ever imagined it, as he took her, with Toothless, through the clouds. He would understand that wistfulness in her, that desire to see how far the world went on like this, to go on flying until everything had fallen away and all that remained was you and your dragon and the promise of more, somewhere beyond the horizon.

The tip of her nose was numb with cold. Astrid ducked her head again and rubbed her thumb over her nose.

“Stormfly would love this,” she said to Toothless. 

He chortled throatily, the first he’d done since she’d cut him free of the vines. Her heart raced.

“We’re getting close, aren’t we?”

He fluttered his cranial fins. The stinging in her nose no longer bothered her. Astrid resettled in the saddle. Her legs ached, not from the stiffness of the long flight, but for action. Almost there, she thought. She glanced around, seeking out the group. Fishlegs had hunched his shoulders and brought his head down, as a turtle did; the cold had burned his face red, and his cheeks showed scarlet over his scarf. The twins were arguing again. Snotlout alone appeared thoroughly comfortable, as Hookfang trailed smoke from his mouth and Monstrous Nightmares ran hot anyway. 

“Let’s do another blast,” Tuffnut was saying. 

Twice now they’d created large explosions to warm up, Barf spitting his gas and Belch cracking his sparks. The second time, the twins had even warned the rest of them that they were going to do it. The first explosion had caught everyone else by surprise, and Fishlegs had had to rescue Snotlout when Hookfang panicked and bucked him off.

“I’m not wasting any of Barf’s gas,” Ruffnut snapped. “Just because _you_ didn’t think to dress _warm_.”

“My butt’s gonna f-fall off!”

“You don’t have a butt.”

“More of a butt than you’ve g-got. What do you have in there anyway? Sticks?”

Ruffnut hoisted her arse out of the saddle to shake it at Tuffnut. “You want me to sit on you and you can find out?”

“No,” he said, shuddering, “but you could give me that hat.”

She plopped down. “No way! You’re the moron who wanted to look _cool_. So now you are. You’re ice cold.”

“It’s my hat,” Tuffnut said, “Gramps knit it for me—”

“Well, it’s mine now,” Ruffnut said, “‘cause I farted in it—”

“—always taking everything that’s m-mine—”

“—such a big baby—”

Astrid twisted around in the saddle. “What is _wrong_ with you two?”

“Tuffnut’s being a big baby,” Ruffnut said, sneering.

“Nothing,” Tuffnut said loudly at the same time, glaring at her. “Nothing’s wrong. We’re fine.”

She snorted. “ _I’m_ fine. _You’re_ a whiny—”

“You just think ‘cause you were b-born first that means you get everything—”

“Baby,” Ruffnut chanted, “baby, baby, baby—”

Astrid frowned. 

Snotlout, drawing even with her, said, “They’re just being idiots, like usual.”

“Come over here and say it to my face,” Ruffnut threatened.

“Gotta catch me first, babe,” Snotlout shot back. 

Astrid tensed at that, the condescending _babe_ like a bug crawling down the back of her shirt. Laughing, Snotlout looked at her as though to share a grin. He colored instead at the way she’d clenched her jaw. His eyes dropped; he looked to the corner. Only just, he sucked at his lip: a thing so peculiarly Hiccup that Astrid had to turn from him.

“Snotlout’s right,” Fishlegs said. 

He was quiet, just briefly, and then Snotlout recovered. “Of course I’m right. When am I ever not?”

“I can think of a few times,” Astrid said dryly.

“Yeah,” he said, rolling his eyes, “like, _once_.”

She glanced at him again. He’d jacked one shoulder higher than the other and puffed out his chest. He caught her look and rather than say anything else, or avoid her gaze, Snotlout stuck his jaw to the side as though to call a bluff.

“Maybe a couple more than that,” she said.

“Not all the time,” he scoffed. “Just … occasionally. To keep everyone on their toes. It’s all part of my master plan.”

“What’s your master plan?”

“The master plan is…” He smirked. “Nice try, babe. But you can’t crack a Jorgenson.”

The bones of her face ached. With a calmness that crept along her tongue, Astrid said, “Don’t call me babe.” The wind was in her hair; it was in her eyes; she felt it dragging at her skin. Toothless hummed at her.

Snotlout’s mouth opened. He paused. His thick fingers curled around Hookfang’s twisted horns. His gaze fell to Astrid’s shoulder where it stayed a moment. Then his jaw shut, and he looked up at her again, his chin still low and his heavy brow pursed, as if uncertain.

“All right,” he said. “Astrid.”

She studied him and then curtly she nodded.

“They do fight a lot,” Fishlegs said, glancing from Astrid and Snotlout to the twins. 

They’d settled into a stony silence, refusing to look at one another. Tuffnut had lapsed into his normal bearing, shoulders bowed, his back hunched; he was glaring mulishly at the ocean. Ruffnut had pulled the hat down as far as it would go, covering her ears entirely and nearly masking her eyes, too. She sat ramrod straight with her long chin stuck out. Barf and Belch exchanged looks.

“Not like this,” Astrid said, but she let it go at that. 

Hiccup would have recognized it, too, that undercurrent of real anger. The twins tested each other often, trading insults and violent dares, but they didn’t make a habit of pushing one another emotionally. Astrid could browbeat Ruffnut and Tuffnut into obedience, surly perhaps but nevertheless true, as Hiccup could not browbeat them, but Hiccup could make sense of the breakdown of feeling as Astrid could not. Together Astrid and Hiccup might manage a real peace between the twins. Without Hiccup, she supposed the best she could hope for was this quiet, where neither twin would acknowledge the other. 

“Just another reason why we have to get him back,” Astrid said lightly to Toothless.

The group flew on another ten minutes. Then, on the horizon, a smattering of dots appeared. She squinted, peering at them through the thickening snowfall. The wind had picked up, and now the snow drove before them, a dizzying curtain of white. The dots grew; they resolved.

“Ships,” Astrid called. “There’s a small fleet ahead.” 

The fleet was moving, out west, but the storm had slowed them some, and dragons flew far faster than ships could sail or men could row. Toothless growled, the rumble shivering through her legs. Astrid rose out of the saddle, leaning forward to try and see the flags on their masts.

“Fishlegs—”

“On it,” he said. He fumbled for a spy glass in Meatlug’s saddlebag.

Astrid signaled for them all to slow. The snow would disguise their approach, though the snowfall was not yet thick enough to hide them wholly.

“Is that them?” she asked Toothless. “Did they take Hiccup?”

Another heavy growl rolled through Toothless. The fans framing his face had flattened, as tightly pressed to his skull and neck as they could go.

Fishlegs sucked in a breath.

“Who is it?” Astrid asked, knowing.

He lowered the spy glass. He might have paled if the cold hadn’t reddened him so.

“Berserkers,” he said. “Or at least—it’s their flag. With the Skrill.”

“You looked through that thing wrong,” Snotlout scoffed. “They’ve got a new chief. Remember? That freaky, tall girl. Gurpa.”

Ruffnut groaned. “ _Gerda_ , you idiot.”

Astrid shook her head. “It’s Dagur. The Skrill is his sigil. That’s what he thinks, anyway. Those have to be his ships.”

“Uh, one problem,” Ruffnut said. “Alvin’s got Dagur? So it can’t be him.”

“Yeah,” Tuffnut said, “unless—are we at war with the Outcasts again? Please say yes. There’s this one guy I really wanted to set on fire.”

“We haven’t heard from Alvin in two months,” Astrid said. 

It hadn’t seemed too unusual. Perhaps Stoick and Alvin had made peace with one another, and thus Berk and the Outcasts put an end to their skirmishes, but an uneasiness remained between the two tribes and the peoples of the archipelago preferred to keep to their own outside of the annual obligations of signing treaties swearing not to raze anyone else to the ground or to steal all their sheep. Still, if Dagur had escaped custody, the Outcasts ought to have alerted Berk.

Astrid continued. “And Dagur hates Hiccup.”

“I always thought he was k-kind of in love with Hiccup,” Tuffnut said. “You know, like you.”

Ruffnut hit his crown with her fist, knocking his helmet over his eyes. In her peripheral, Astrid saw Snotlout shake his head at Tuffnut, as if pitying him; she didn’t much care if he did.

“That isn’t love,” Astrid snapped. She scowled through the wall of snow. Her face stung, her scabbing cheek especially so. It was the comparison, Astrid to Dagur, and not the joke, that she loved Hiccup, that turned her gut. “Dagur wants to—own him. Or break him. Like he wants to break everything else.”

The snow frenzied; the wind hastened, screaming. 

“What do we do?” Fishlegs asked over it. “If it’s Dagur… Should we wait for the chief?”

“No,” Astrid shouted. Her hair whipped at her face; long strands blew into her eyes. “Because it’s Dagur! If he doesn’t get what he wants from Hiccup, he’ll…” 

She couldn’t say; she didn’t know. She didn’t want to know. She had to face it.

“Dagur will be on the flagship,” she said at last. “That’s where he’ll have Hiccup. And that’s where I’m going. I need you to distract the other ships. Fishlegs, how many?”

“Five ships,” he said, “six if you mean the flagship too. But Astrid, visibility is almost nil—”

“And that’s going to work in our favor,” she said with conviction. “They won’t see us coming. We’re lucky it’s snowing this strongly.”

“Speak for yourself,” said Tuffnut. “You’re not freezing to death.”

“Look,” Astrid said, “I just need you to keep those other ships occupied! That’s what you’re good at it. Keep them busy, and do whatever you have to do to keep them from grouping around the flagship. Burn them down if you have to.”

Ruffnut’s cackle rose, sharp on the wind. “Yeah! Burn ‘em to the _ground!_ ”

“But try to stay out of sight! Dagur’s going to expect us, and we want them to stay confused.”

“Stealthy,” Snotlout shouted. “I like it. Good thing I’m here, right? Master of stealth.” 

He patted Hookfang, who snapped and burped a long plume of fire that had Meatlug dodging wildly to the side. Fishlegs shrieked.

“Like that,” Astrid said, “only try to aim at the Berserkers and not _us_.”

“It’s okay, Fang,” Snotlout soothed, “you’re going to set all those losers on fire.” He flicked his hand at Astrid. “Go rescue Hiccup already. I got all of this under my control.”

She let that slide. Astrid stretched out across Toothless’ back again, so that she could speak directly to his ear. “Go. Go.” She shifted her foot, snapping the tail fin in place for a speed run. Toothless was already in motion, his wings pivoting to ride the wind. Her collar drove against her face, the fur harsh at her nose. The bite of their descent braced her; she steadied; the nervous, clutching fear in her chest gave way to something sharper, sweeter, vengeful. 

“I hate stealth,” Tuffnut announced to the group in her wake. “Ugh. B-boring. How are we supposed to be stealthy while we’re blowing stuff up?”

“Um, duh,” Ruffnut said, rolling her eyes, “we use our _brains_.”

Tuffnut made a face. “Gross. I don’t even need a brain. Not when I’ve got all of this.” He flexed.

“That’s why I’m the boss,” Ruffnut said, “and you’re my sidekick.”

“I am _not_ anyone’s sidekick!”

“You’re all under _my_ control,” Snotlout reminded them, though no one was listening. “Astrid left _me_ in charge.”

“Nobody left you in charge,” said Tuffnut, staring at him. “You just want to suck up to her.”

Ruffnut made smacking sounds, and Snotlout purpled.

“We just need to use the snow as cover,” Fishlegs said. “Dart in and then out.”

Snotlout leapt at the chance to divert the twins. Laughing, he said, “On _that_ thing?”

Fishlegs rubbed Meatlug’s cheeks. “Don’t listen to him, princess. He’s just jealous. I know you can do it. Can’t you?”

“Shut _up_ ,” Ruffnut said, “ugh! Marry your stupid dragon later! Do you still have those balloons?”

“Oh,” Tuffnut said. A nasty sort of smile unfurled. He began digging in his coat. “Oh, yeah. I definitely have those balloons. Let’s fireb-bomb those punks.”

“Hey!” said Snotlout. He stuck his fists on his hips, as Astrid would have done. “You’re supposed to run that by me first!”

“Give ‘em!” Ruffnut thrust her hand at Tuffnut. “Barf, start barfing.” Gas flitted from Barf’s mouth, yanked from between his teeth by the wind. Ruffnut popped a balloon between his teeth, gathering the gas in it.

Fishlegs gaped a moment at Ruffnut. Then he closed his mouth. He blinked.

“If you’re making bombs…”

“We’re making bombs,” Ruffnut said, “we’re making the biggest, baddest bombs. We’re going to blow that entire fleet to the sky!”

“You’ll need something to weigh them down,” Fishlegs said, thinking. “I’m sorry, Meatlug, but I have to give them your snack.” 

Meatlug groaned sadly as he fished the rucksack, filled with fist-sized rocks, out of her saddlebag. Her eyes followed it longingly. Fishlegs tossed that sack to Tuffnut, who snatched it out of the air. Ripping the sack open and grabbing the first gas-filled balloon from Ruffnut, Tuffnut dropped a rock in it.

“This is going to be so awesome,” Tuffnut giggled gleefully. “Hey, when we go ask the Outcasts how they let Dagur get away, we’re totally showing this off to Mildew.”

“We’re going to need a fuse too,” Fishlegs said, directing Meatlug to fly steadily next to Barf, “but—”

“ _Oi!_ ” said Snotlout. “Isn’t anyone going to ask me what I _say_ we’re going to do?”

Ruffnut handed Tuffnut two more balloons. He juggled them, trying to pinch the openings shut so the gas remained while also sticking rocks in the balloons.

“Hey, how many hands do you think I have?” 

“Snotlout!” Ruffnut shouted. She batted her eyelashes terrifyingly. “Get over here, you big, handsome, heroic leader of men, you.”

Warily, he led Hookfang nearer. “If you’re making fun of me…”

“Ha!” said Ruffnut. “I totally am.” 

Quick as a snake, she hooked her fist in his collar, hauled Snotlout—screaming—down, and stuffed his head in Hookfang’s mouth. Hookfang squeaked. Smoke burst out his nostrils. Ruffnut yanked Snotlout’s head out of Hookfang’s mouth and then, with her other hand, yanked a fistful of hair out of Snotlout’s head. Snotlout screamed again.

“Babe!” He massaged his forehead. “ _Why!_ ”

“Fuses,” Ruffnut said proudly, showing the spit-wet black hairs to Tuffnut and Fishlegs. “Just stick ‘em in and tie ‘em off.”

“Wicked,” Tuffnut said. “Let’s do it!”

“For Hiccup,” said Fishlegs.

“For glory!” said Ruffnut, punching the air.

“For Mildew!” roared Tuffnut. “A Thorston never forgets!”

“Yeah!” said Ruffnut, punching Tuffnut rather than the air. “We’ll teach him never to make a Thorston apologize in public!”

And ahead of them, invisible in the fury of the snow, Astrid rode Toothless. Her breath shook between her teeth, and her eyes, which had first watered, were dried. She kept her eyes just slotted, though all she saw was white, streaming toward her. The snow lashed her; the frost in her eyelashes nipped her cheeks. Her nose had gone numb, too numb even to burn. The greater cold sat inside her.

Dagur hated Hiccup. He hadn’t always. As the daughter of a carpenter and a perfectly ordinary warrior woman of the Berk tradition, Astrid had not been privy to the annual meetings between Oswald and Stoick or the associated meetings of their heirs. But she had known of Dagur before she knew him. Snotlout, son of the brother to the chief’s late wife, had sat in on a few of Dagur’s games and told the rest of the children of how Dagur liked to play. People were amusements to Dagur and Hiccup had been a favorite toy.

When Hiccup had ceased to be helpless, Astrid thought. That was when Dagur had begun to hate Hiccup. When Hiccup was no longer the great joke of Berk but a hero: then; or else it was that he’d friends and Dagur had only what he made, and that was people who feared him and did not love him. As Hiccup was loved, she thought. The coldness in her was a knife in a sheath, waiting to be freed. She had envied Hiccup’s successes, too. I’m not Dagur, she thought fiercely; but she carried that guilt. She thought she might always carry it. 

Toothless shot on through the blizzard, as an arrow aimed well and loosed on a clear day would shoot, unerring. The ships were weird shadows in the snowfall, now leering, now gone. The scream of Toothless’ flight was lost in the wind.

She shifted forward in the saddle, riding up on the horn. It crushed into the high crease of her thigh.

“The ship with the flag,” she shouted. “Find that ship! That’s where we’ll find Hiccup!”

Did Toothless need her to say? His flaps shivered; he snorted. 

A mast loomed without warning and Astrid hurried to snap the tail fin into place, that Toothless might weave around it. He barked as they passed. She’d seen the flag too.

“Stay with them,” Astrid said. Her teeth ached. She gritted them. Turning her face from the wind, she looked over her shoulder. The flagship had faded to a bleak suggestion. “We need to wait for the others.”

Toothless jerked his head but stayed the course. They circled wide, climbing against the wind. She kept her head turned, tracing that mast as it reappeared below them. Ice crusted the flag, now masking the Skrill. 

On their third circuit, an explosion ripped through the air, a heavy boom at odds with the wind’s shrill cry. Fire flared red behind the snow, and briefly the outline of another ship showed. Then a second explosion illuminated a third vessel on the far side of the flagship.

“Go,” Astrid said, “go!”

Toothless dove. Around them, on all sides, roiling pockets of fire burst like lightning bugs in summer. Ships flashed, suddenly bright silhouettes swallowed by the tempest, then appearing again. They closed in on the flagship. The deck rushed to meet Astrid and Toothless.

She rose in the saddle. With her heel clicked the fin fully open. She was on her feet in the stirrups; she grabbed the ax; she slung her leg over so she perched on the one side, her knees braced for balance, the ax in one hand and the other clinging to the saddle horn. As Toothless, howling, bore down upon the man now turning to them at the prow, Astrid leapt from Toothless’ back. She caught the ax handle in her second hand and swung to hit the man across the shoulder, gouging but not killing. Landing on her knee, she pushed off it. The angle had proved too shallow to fracture the arm. She brought the ax around for a second pass, slamming the flat against his arm. All this she did while he struggled first to draw his sword and then to remain standing. 

The bone crunched. He fell. He’d a sore, scabbed over, and a hole where his ear should have been, noticed and then dismissed as Astrid strode over him. He’d live.

Toothless had another man pinned. The man strained, clawing uselessly at Toothless’ legs. He’d buried his claws in that man’s shoulders. Blood darkened the coat, blood along the breast.

“Don’t kill him,” Astrid said sharply. Death was another thing.

Toothless bared his teeth and snarled, gleaming blackly in the frenetic snowfall. The deck was slick with it. Astrid hefted the ax, a comfort to her hands, and stalked toward the man. His eyes were huge and dark; he looked at her as he might a ghost, or a valkyrie come to guide the brave to Valhalla and leave the rest for Hel.

“Where,” she said, “is my chief’s son?”

*

While Hiccup worked he chattered; an old habit he’d picked up from Gobber. It only seemed to come out when he’d company, “probably because I just want to share my melodious voice,” he joked. “How could I justify keeping this sweet sound from the people? No, no, that wouldn’t be right. Can’t hog it all for myself. You deserve it. How you doing over there?”

The Pox blinked drowsily. Its eyes glimmered wetly in the dwindling yellow light of the lamp, set by its paw, so that it could see at least something, more than it had before. Toothless did well at night, but the Pox, if it were nocturnal, had eyes weakened by illness. The pupils shifted; it focused and unfocused, sometimes at once, sometimes one eye drifting while the other lingered. So, he’d left it the lamp. Hiccup didn’t much need the light for prying out nails. He’d thought that, anyway. Sighing, he paused to stretch his fingers again. The skin at the inside of his first finger on the left hand had split, in the seam of the knuckle. He winced when it peeled.

“I really should’ve remembered to grab gloves this morning. Not that a kidnapping is something you prepare for, like a nice camping trip or a scenic vacation.”

He studied his fingertips. They didn’t look as if they intended to fall off. Very gently he flexed his fingers, the first knuckles, then the second, then, more stiffly, the knuckles closest to the tips. That split finger, he left curled.

“Not a lot of scenery to be had here,” he said absently. He sucked the blood from that finger.

The dragon made a low and brittle sound. Hiccup spat the blood. More refuse for the floor. With no other choice, he’d pissed in the far corner, on the other side of the door. Chained and imprisoned, the dragon soiled where it lay; that was part of the stink. Hiccup didn’t particularly want to add to that, but his gut had begun to pinch, and so he had done his best to keep it to the one small spot.

“I’m working on it,” he told the dragon. “Going to be a lot of nice, bone-chilling air in here real soon. Just what every dragon of mysterious origin wants.” He’d have to huddle next to the dragon once he had the porthole uncovered. The room was chill enough already, but the cold seeping in under the grill’s covering, and under the board, was a cutting cold.

He gripped the small pry bar. Collapsible, it folded in half for storage and locked in place when straightened. The joint jittered, and whoever had nailed the board over the porthole had done an exceptional job. Working the forked end of the bar just beneath the nail’s head, he resumed leveraging it. So far he’d managed to pick it a modest fifth of an inch out of the wood. Truly, his father would be proud.

“When we get out of here,” Hiccup grunted, “I swear to Thor, and my dad, and every gigantic—musclebound—meathead—who has ever punched down a tree on Berk, since trees and men first began living beside one another on Berk—I am going to start working out with Snotlout.”

The nail now stood an impressive half-inch out. Hiccup shook his hand. His palm throbbed, as if swollen, where the bar had pushed into the fleshy pad and against the bone beneath the muscle.

“You may very well be asking yourself, ‘Why Snotlout? Why not Astrid of whom I’ve heard so much?’ All good questions.”

The dragon waited.

“Well,” Hiccup said, wiggling the bar, “Snotlout may be unappealing, uncivilized, and not especially kind to the sense, any of them, or to me, personally—ohhh, Thor’s toenails, I hope whoever nailed this sits on a Stingthing.” He savored the thought, a petty one, of a man who looked very much like Dagur sitting on the tiny, venomous dragon. A single injection from its stinger could cause even the halest of Vikings to swell up like a balloon. He chased that thought and found himself thinking again of Astrid in the academy, waiting for Hiccup, her arms crossed and her mouth hard and her foot tapping in the dirt, a heap of sheep bladder balloons waiting with her. 

“Anyway. It’s exactly those qualities a person such as myself looks for in a spotter. Whereas Astrid may be stronger, smarter, faster, and frankly on paper she is way more qualified than Snotlout in just about every way, but, and you might be ahead of me here, I’m already having kind of a hard time figuring out where we stand—me and Astrid—and the last time I saw her working out I almost swallowed my tongue. And believe me, standing there and gawping is not one of the better moves in my repertoire.”

The nail popped free, spitting a few small splinters. Hiccup staggered, thrown off balance by his own show of force.

“That,” he said, “was ridiculous. I work at a forge. I can lift a hammer!” Not Gobber’s great hammer, but most of the other hammers. “And sure, that was a matter of leverage and not brute strength—” Even Gobber with his great hammer would have struggled with it, but then Gobber with his great hammer could have simply smashed the board. “But still. No,” Hiccup said, shaking his head, “you know what, I’m going to put the Stingthing in the guy’s chair myself.”

He moved to pull out the nail on the other end of the board. Thoughts of Astrid tapping her feet in the dirt gave way to thoughts of Astrid, running through the village in the early morning, racing with Stormfly. He’d caught up with her on Toothless, meaning, as he pressed Toothless to follow Astrid, to say something clever about losing her dragon, or losing to her dragon, or something like that. Her hair had shone, bright with sunlight, and long flyaway strands framed her face. She’d been flushed with the exercise, flushed and glowing, and so he had forgotten to say anything at all.

“Get out of the way, Hiccup!” she’d yelled.

He’d snapped to attention, as Astrid vaulted two steps up a wall, jumped off Toothless’ back, and over a cart that had tipped in the middle of the path. The baker, Bungdung, yelped and ducked as Toothless shot over him. Astrid stumbled but kept going. She’d looked over her shoulder, though, to check the baker and not Hiccup, sitting there like a lump on Toothless and watching her go. He’d the strangest moment of déjà vu, as though he were stuck in the forge looking out at Astrid as she ran past the window without so much as a glance inside. That was a boy he’d thought he had left behind.

Then Astrid had thrown her arm up in a salute, her wrist arched, hand tipped, her fingers fanning wide. She’d grinned at Hiccup. Her face, already wide, rounded. She waved at him.

“Try not to mow anyone down!” she shouted. “I’ll see you later!”

He’d waved at her, but she had turned away again, and whatever it is he wanted to say to her had stuck in his throat, too big a thing to make it off his tongue. Toothless always got him out of bed before his brain had woken up.

Hiccup fought with the second nail. This one had driven in at an angle, half-splitting the grain. Getting the pry bar around the head was a trick. The trick was to try something else. With his front teeth pinching his lip he turned the pry bar so he might use one of the tines to dig into the wood. Working had cleared his head some; gabbing had helped as well. 

The dragon made a noise then he hadn’t heard from it before, a trill rather like the sort Stormfly used when she thought Astrid wasn’t paying her as much attention as she ought. Hiccup looked at the dragon in surprise. It gazed right back at him and trilled a second time, soft from its poorly healed mouth.

“You want to hear more?” Hiccup asked it.

The Pox shuffled, moving its head farther down its leg and closer, thusly, to Hiccup. The lamp flickered.

Hiccup ducked his head, smiling. “Aw, you don’t want to hear more of that.”

Again, the Pox chirped. An awful lot of gunk had built up beneath those sticky eyes. He’d have to clean that.

“Well, there’s not a whole lot else to tell,” he said. “When you meet her, you’ll understand. She’s—” The nail rose slightly, and he hooked it. “She’s really something. She acts touch, and don’t get me wrong, she _is_ tough, but if you don’t mess things up too badly, Astrid will do whatever’s necessary to help you out. Sometimes even when you do mess things up that badly. And maybe that’s the problem,” Hiccup said, “is I don’t know if she does some of the things she does because she likes me as—” He paused and blew his cheeks out. “Well. You know.”

The Pox tipped its head, listening.

“Okay,” Hiccup allowed, “maybe you don’t. Does any of this mean anything to you? Or is it actually just my voice? Because that’s flattering, I have to say. That’s a first. I was mostly just joking earlier when I said that thing, about my voice. You must be truly desperate for company.”

How long had the Pox lived in this hold, alone with its waste and its sickness and the dark? Its eyes had closed. As softly as before it called for Hiccup to go on speaking.

“I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “I don’t always think things through. Astrid says I think too much, but.”

He pulled at the nail, dragging it a painful inch out. 

“Maybe if she did do what she does just for me,” Hiccup said, “she wouldn’t be Astrid.”

The Pox sighed. With one last strong tug, Hiccup got the nail the whole way out and the board off.

“There you go.” He tossed the board to the corner. “Good, fresh air, and—ohhh, shoot. It’s snowing.” 

He backed away quickly as the wind blasted flurries through the porthole, scattering fat white flakes madly.

“Hope you like cuddling, Pox,” he said. He swept his hand up its scarred and bruised head, tracing the line of its arched brow. The dragon leaned into his touch. His coat lay drying, spread across the deck. “I have got to think of a better name for you. Something like—”

He was stooping to pick up his coat when he heard it, muffled by the howling wind but unmistakable: an explosion. The dragon raised its head. Those sleepy eyes opened, the blinded pair too. A whine began in its throat. Hiccup ran to the porthole, too fast as the ship pitched; he came up hard against the wall. He struggled to track anything in the snow—a blizzard and not the milder storm they’d expected—but then in the dark spaces between flurries he saw it: a concussive fireball ripping through the sails of another of Dagur’s ships.

Now. It happened now.

Hiccup snatched up the pry bar, fumbling with the locking mechanism. “All right,” he said, “we agreed no fire but my guess is someone’s going to come through that door in about, oh—”

Now.

The door banged. Snow poured around Dagur. Why would Hiccup have expected anyone else? He had a sword in his hand, a long sword and not a knife. Dagur’s gaze lit on Hiccup. His hand convulsed around the hilt, and then Dagur threw the sword away. His eyes were on Hiccup; he didn’t look away, even as the Pox, catching a glancing blow from the discarded sword, shrieked and struggled to stand. The chains clattered thunderously.

“Dagur,” Hiccup started. His hands rose between them.

Dagur batted them away with his arm and boxed Hiccup’s ear. His head rang, and he only just dodged the second strike, aimed for the other ear.

“Every time!” Dagur screamed. He was bright with fever and foul with worse. “You ruin it! You! Stupid, weak, spineless Hiccup!”

Hiccup dodged again. The sword. Where was the sword? The Pox shrieked again, blisteringly loud and at odds with the wind snarling about the ship and the roar of another explosion and another. The pry bar bit into Hiccup’s hand.

“All our games,” said Dagur, “all our fun! After I forgave you all your transgressions! I forgave you, brother! I did! When no one else wanted you, I was your friend.”

Hiccup struggled for calm, trying both to watch Dagur and to look for the sword. “I need you to listen to me. You need to stop and think about what you’re doing.”

Dagur’s shadow climbed the walls. As Hiccup passed before the door, wind-tossed snow kicked around his feet. A flake nipped his ear. Here was winter, come early. Here was Dagur, who had once told Hiccup how lucky he was to have Dagur for a friend and brother while weird, bony Gerda stayed in her room, far from Dagur.

“Think about what you want,” Hiccup pleaded.

And here was Hiccup, trying to reason with the boy who had held him under the water and beaten Toothless and held Stoick’s life hostage. He had bested Dagur before. He had done it.

“You need me, remember?” said Hiccup’s mouth. “To take back your tribe?”

He had tried to kill Stoick. Perhaps when he forced Hiccup’s head underwater he had never really meant to let him up again. As a child Hiccup had known what Dagur could do. The lesson had stuck. Hiccup knew it. They all did. Dagur had killed Oswald to become chief.

“I protected you,” Dagur said. “You were useless. Worse than useless. And I looked out for you!” He laughed as though he couldn’t believe he had ever been so foolish as to put his faith in Hiccup.

Hiccup stumbled. He’d caught his heel on the dragon’s tail, coiled about it as it tried and failed to make its largeness small, beneath notice. The collar dug into the Pox’s throat. The scales there had broken or chafed; perhaps it had scratched them away because of its illness and not Dagur’s shackles. 

Dagur would kill him. He meant to kill Gerda. He would be the Skrill the Berserkers both worshipped and reviled, spilling ruin where he went, driven by whatever it was that drove Dagur. Hate. Greed. Absolute surety of his righteousness. Hiccup would rather have the Skrill; he’d rather the Pox than Dagur.

“Stoick should have drowned you when you were born,” said Dagur, closing on him, “but I guess he was too sentimental.” He laughed again. 

“At least,” said Hiccup, “my dad knows I love him. What—” He squinted as if unsure. “What was it exactly you said to Oswald when you stabbed him in the back? Or cut his throat? Smothered your father while he was sleeping? Is that how you did it?”

The lines of Dagur’s face stilled. A muscle in his cheek began to tighten.

“Face it, Dagur,” Hiccup went on, too quickly for breath as it all fell out of him at last, “you’re just a bully. Nobody loves you. Nobody even likes you. All those men who betrayed your sister for you, you think they did it because they, what, believe in you? What did you tell them? That you’d kill them if they didn’t follow you?”

Dagur’s chin lowered. Some part of Hiccup wanted to shrink away; he saw Dagur’s face, before the tattoo, before whatever sickness had eaten at him, that gleeful boy laughing at Hiccup as through the water. 

“You think one of those men won’t kill you one day?” Hiccup asked, gesturing toward the open door. “That they want to protect you? When have you ever protected anyone? When have you ever done anything for anyone else?”

That old thoughtful look spread over Dagur. 

“I should have drowned you,” he said, and he got Hiccup by the throat. His hands tightened. He squeezed. 

The Pox’s scream harshed. 

“We did have some good times together,” he said, as if to apologize for the dryness of his palms on Hiccup’s neck, “and I am going to miss you. You were always fun. And I always thought of you like you really were my brother. My tiny, useless brother.”

He shrugged. His thumbs dug in. Hiccup gagged. He jabbed his arms up between Dagur’s arms and slammed his forearms against the insides of Dagur’s elbows, trying to buckle his grip. He hadn’t broken Dagur’s hold as a child. He couldn’t break it now.

“Oh, well,” said Dagur. “You were more entertaining than Gerda, anyway.”

The wind wailed. At Dagur’s back the snow danced on, white and cruel as any sea ghost come out of its grave, come to watch as Dagur strangled Hiccup as he had practiced all those years, to see if Hiccup’s friends would find him blue in the face on the floor. He tried to cry out. He couldn’t manage that either. The pry bar was thin in Hiccup’s hand, the metal cold between his fingers. As over a terrible distance he heard chains grinding, wood creaking.

And then she had come.

Astrid pushed through the snow. The ghost dispelled. She barreled down the stairs. Her face was red, brilliantly red, flush with winter, and she’d snowflakes woven through her tangled hair, half out its braid and spilling over her shoulder. She’d worn the blue coat with the fur collar that swallowed her jaw. He saw her there in the doorway with a bloodied ax in her gloved hands and her breath gusting before her, warmer than any spirit rising out of the waves. At last.

Blackness crept on him, eating at the world so only Astrid remained, Astrid and also Dagur, grinning broadly. He did not care for ghosts; he did not see Astrid. His vision had tunneled as Hiccup’s now tunneled. Astrid was in motion. She was coming for Hiccup. Her hands shifted; she gripped the handle with a hand high beneath the head and the other half down the handle, turned the opposing way. Ice cracked under her feet. 

He hadn’t got to the sword. Hiccup turned his hand and buried the forked tines of the pry bar into the crook of Dagur’s neck, there where it curved to meet with his shoulder.

Dagur screamed. His hands jolted; his death grip relaxed. Bracing, Hiccup drove his metal foot into Dagur’s knee. Dagur staggered a single step back. His cracked lips peeled from his teeth. The pry bar jutted from his collar; he left it. His fingers were shaped like claws as he reached. Hiccup scrabbled away, clutching at his throat.

“I _hate you_ —”

Astrid struck him across the back. The ax thunked meatily. Hiccup had seen her cut a young tree down like that once, one steady blow placed after another, breaking the oak. Dagur drew a horrible, shocked, wet breath. His eyes were cold. He looked directly at Hiccup, even as Astrid wrenched the ax out of his back. The ax head shone, slicked.

He said, “Brother—” and Hiccup stared, not at the boy who had held him under the water, but the man that boy had become. 

Blood dotted Astrid’s cheek. Her breath shook, a quivering cloud. A strand of hair had caught in the corner of her mouth. She looked at Hiccup, her eyes huge. Whatever she saw, her lips firmed. She hefted the ax again. 

Dagur, gaunt and fevered and tattooed and fixed on Hiccup, made to move.

Hiccup said—

The chains finally ripped from the wood. The dragon screamed, a gutted and fluid sound. Something warm and foul-smelling sprayed against Hiccup’s leg. The dragon’s tangled teeth gleamed. It loomed, jaws distending like a shark’s, over Dagur: Dagur, who stretched his hand out to Hiccup. Then the Pox snapped its teeth together. Collapsing to the deck, the dragon carried Dagur, his legs jerking, with it.

Hiccup opened his mouth. Nothing came out. He coughed and his throat throbbed, as if he’d swallowed coals.

Astrid, white beneath her wind-burn, swapped the ax to one hand and ran to Hiccup. Her brow was like ice on his throat; her face fit neatly to his shoulder, as neatly as his arms fit around her. His hands, more numb than not, shook. He knotted his fingers in her coat, clutching Astrid.

She clung to the ax still. The handle was hard against his side. The copper stink of blood waited under her winter smell. Hiccup buried his face in her hair, a mess on her shoulder, the snow melting in her hair sticking to his cheeks.

He rasped: “Toothless—”

“He’s here,” Astrid said, and Hiccup gasped, all the air he’d drawn exploding into her hair.

She drew away. The blood had smeared along her jaw.

“We need to go,” she said. Her hand cupped his jaw. Her eyelashes had clumped together; they paled with frost. “The storm’s getting worse. If we don’t leave now—”

“I have to—”

Astrid’s hand slipped from his chin as he turned. She brushed his shoulder.

The Pox labored for breath. Its eyes had lidded. Looking up to Hiccup, it trilled faintly. Its teeth were stained. There was cloth, ripped between them. Dagur lay motionless beneath its heaving chest. The chain holding the Pox’s right front leg had held. The leg had not. It bent back at a horrid, steep angle. Nor had the vast blister on its belly held as it lunged for Dagur. The deck was slicker and darker than Dagur’s blood on Astrid’s ax, with more than what Dagur gave.

Astrid sucked a breath through her nose. “What…”

“Dagur captured it,” Hiccup said. He went to his knees beside the dragon. A flare ran up his thigh from his stump. “He wanted me to train it, so he could.” Hiccup would not look at Dagur, whose head was gone. Dagur’s hand was still stretching out, the back on the floor, the fingers half-curled.

Hiccup touched the dragon, a hand beneath each nostril.

“He wanted to use it to kill his sister,” Hiccup said.

The dragon closed its eyes. Its breath washed over his cold fingers; it warmed his wrists. The smell was wretched. One of Dagur’s feet pointed to the ceiling, the other to the doorway. Snow was piling on the steps. Hiccup’s stomach heaved. 

Astrid had a particular way of walking. Very even steps, long strides, weight on her toes except when she fought. Then, she ground her heels in the earth. 

She crouched beside Hiccup. She reached for him. Her palm slid to his shoulder.

“It’s sick.”

Hiccup fanned his fingers gently along the dragon’s snout. 

“He thought that—it could spread plague.”

“It can’t,” said Astrid, a question. Her hand tightened, till his shoulder twinged where she held him.

He shook his head. “Dagur _is_ sick, but. It’s something else.”

Astrid was silent for a long and heavy minute. Hiccup glanced at her. She was looking not at the Pox, or at Hiccup, but at Dagur’s half-opened hand. Her face pinched. Then she noticed his gaze, and she looked back at him with something he had perhaps only seen once or twice before on her, some sort of thing that was pleading in the angle of her brow, or perhaps the way her lower lip had dropped.

“Astrid?”

She turned. Her hair masked her face. She stood, her fingertips lingering at his shoulder.

“We have to go,” she said again, more brusquely. “We don’t have any time.”

He watched the dragon, breathing into his hands. The lamp had nearly gone out. The dragon murmured. It had feared Dagur, and yet it had done this for Hiccup. To pull the chains free so it could reach Dagur the dragon had broken its leg, split its belly. Why? Hiccup had talked to it for a time. He hadn’t beaten it. That had been enough. 

“If we—knew more about them,” Hiccup said hoarsely. “How to—to treat them when they’re sick.” A weight pounded in his skull.

The fractured leg bone had punched through the dragon’s thick skin. Nothing could save that.

“Maybe next time,” Astrid said, “we will.”

The dragon sighed as Hiccup took his hands from it. He was shaking all over. He couldn’t stop the shaking. His coat was somewhere beneath the Pox. 

Astrid fumbled with her coat. She took his hand and pushed something into it and then closed his fingers around it. Gloves, grey wool ones knit with yellow flecks around the wrist. She covered his fingers with her own fleetingly. 

“Toothless is on the deck,” she said. “He couldn’t fit down the steps. I left him to look over the rest of Dagur’s crew. I knew you’d forget your gloves again.”

“The day didn’t really go like I expected it would.”

They were both looking at his hand, his fingers chapped, burned. Astrid’s gaze strayed. Hiccup followed the long curve of her jaw as it flowed to her ear. Hesitatingly, he touched his thumb to the uneven line of blood running across her face. She startled at his touch. She held the ax, bloodied from Dagur, with the head pointed at an angle from her arm and the handle cradled to her chest. 

He said, “Is Toothless…”

“He’s fine,” Astrid said. She tried to smile. Her eyebrows wrinkled. “He found us. Or Fishlegs found him.” She swallowed a breath. Abruptly she looked away from Hiccup. The mess of her hair had stuck in her collar. “You should go see him. I did my best flying him but he’s missed you. Put the gloves on before your hands fall off.”

He said, “I—just give me a moment. Please.”

Her face turned to him, but her eyes remained fixed elsewhere. Then she did raise her eyes.

She said, “Okay.”

Hiccup bent to brush the Pox’s nose. It sighed in its chest. He petted the long, scabbed snout once. Again. 

“Thank you,” Hiccup said. He clutched the gloves. Hiccup rolled his lips. They’d cracked. He tasted blood, come from a split on the far left of his lower lip. He said, “I’m sorry.”

Hiccup withdrew his hand. He straightened. His knee protested. 

“Maybe I should—”

“Go,” said Astrid. She held the ax with both hands, the head tipped to the floor. Her jaw was tight, her eyes low. “You should let Toothless know you’re all right.”

Hiccup lingered at the door. He was shuddering, unable to stop it. The snow had gone to sleet, pelting his cheek. His skin was hot, somehow. Her shoulders were flat. She stood over the Pox, and her hair shone in the dwindling light like summer wheat. Her back was unbent. At her foot, Dagur was reaching for Hiccup, his hand pointed to the door. 

Hiccup said, “Astrid, I—”

She moved, just enough that he could see her jaw, still stained with blood. 

“Thank you,” he said again.

He pulled the gloves on over his hands as he climbed the slippery steps. Halfway up, he stopped to rotate his foot for the pick. The deck was ice-slicked. If he bent just a bit more he could see into the hold again. Hiccup went up into the storm.

“Toothless,” he shouted. The ice belted furiously. “Toothless!”

Over the wind, through the ice, Toothless called to him. 

“Toothless!” he yelled. “I’m right here, buddy!”

He hoisted his arm before his face, squinting beneath the little shelter it afforded. He saw—but it was only the wind blowing snow and sleet in a contrary direction, shifting its course. Then a shadow was nearing him, and the snowstorm was parting, and Toothless had encircled him. Toothless yowled joyously and butted his head into Hiccup’s chest again, again, his back too. Toothless’ wings spread, creating an umbrella cover that let Hiccup grab at Toothless’ chest to hold him. 

“I was freaked out too, bud,” Hiccup said. He closed his eyes, listening to Toothless’ double hearts as they pumped, one beating after the other. “Thanks for coming for me. Thank you for bringing Astrid.”

Toothless keened and rubbed his snout in Hiccup’s hair. 

“It’s okay now.” Hiccup rested his face in the crook of Toothless’ neck, offered to him. “Everything’s all right. We’re going to be fine.” He stroked Toothless’ jaw. His hands felt brittle. The winter cold burned his ears. He wound his hands behind the flaps ringing Toothless’ head.

Toothless grumbled a question.

“It’s okay,” Hiccup said again.

He ventured out of the shelter of Toothless’ wings to get into the saddle. The new, tearing blisters under his leg’s cuff, and the stiffness of his fingers, and the driving ice made it slow and clumsy work. He collapsed against the saddle horn. His head had started swimming again. His temples burned like his ears did.

“Are you all right?” 

He opened his eyes. Astrid had her hand on his good knee. The ax hung from her other hand. The head of it dripped. He stared at the edge.

“Hiccup,” said Astrid. “Hiccup!” She squeezed his knee.

“I’m fine,” he said. His throat scratched to say it. “Let’s get out of here.”

Astrid nodded and hopped on to Toothless’ back. She fixed the ax in the compartment. One of her hands settled lightly on his waist. Toothless was antsy beneath them, stretching his wings and shaking his tail.

“We have to get the others,” she shouted. “I had them distract the other ships while we rescued you. Hookfang’s teething!”

“That explains the explosions,” Hiccup called, trying for humor. The shape of it was flat in his mouth.

Toothless readied his wings and, lowering his head, he ran the length of the ship, going with the wind. He leapt into the air, and Astrid hooked her hands together at Hiccup’s belly, her chest pressing to his back. He glanced over his shoulder at the ship, but the blizzard had swallowed it. All he saw before the storm took the last of it was the flag, its sigil buried in a layer of ice, the Skrill just a vague, distorted shape. Then that had gone too.

*

The dragon didn’t fight her. She thought it might. Perhaps she hoped it would. Either way she had to do what she had remained to do. The dragon’s eyes fluttered open, to track Hiccup as he left up the steps. Pockets of blood had burst behind and in its eyeballs. It stared a moment and then its eyelids slipped to its cheeks.

As a girl she had a dog, a shaggy old fellow too lazy to herd for her aunt. His eyes had gone too over time. Inevitably he misjudged a jump. A broken leg might could be something a younger dog would survive. A broken back, no dog would.

“It’s a mercy,” her mother said. She slung her ax over her shoulder. “You don’t have to come with, girl.”

Astrid stood on the ridge. Her face was still wet from the crying, her mouth slimed with snot. His back had not unbent in her absence; his legs had not untwisted as she got her mother. She would have gone down to hold his head in her lap but her mother made her stay at the top, by the elder tree. When her mother brought the ax down, Astrid understood.

She tried to do it quickly, as her mother had done. Make it a mercy. The dragon’s neck was thicker than the dog’s. After the first stroke, the dragon cried out. It stirred but it could not rise. She bit her lip and lifted the ax again. One of the workman axes from the academy, its heft was wrong, as if someone had taken her arm and given her someone else’s in its stead. She swung it, aiming for the skin above the collar. Four strokes: then the dragon was quiet. Its breath ran out of it. There was nothing merciful to be had in four strokes. The cold air bit her throat, a knife swallowed. 

She clutched the ax handle. The palm of her right glove was sodden. She wanted to strip the glove off and leave it with Dagur. His bare hand rested on the floorboards. The dragon had taken his head and much of his right shoulder. If he’d fallen on his chest, Astrid could have made out the place in his back where she had buried the ax head deep into flesh, deep into muscle. 

When the dog was dead, Astrid’s mother had put the ax down beside it and then climbed the ridge. She gathered Astrid up and held her and said, “It was the right thing to do.”

Astrid said, “He’s dead,” and hid her face in her mother’s shoulder so no one could see how she cried, like a little girl. She’d been six then. Too old to cry like that, she thought.

Her mother had never been a gentle woman. She petted Astrid once, stroking the hair back from her face. Astrid had burrowed deeper into her mother’s coat. Her mother pressed her lips to Astrid’s temple. 

“He won’t hurt anymore,” her mother said. Then she’d patted Astrid on the back and told her to go on ahead to the house and check to see how her cousin Eiljótr was getting on with fixing the roof from the last dragon raid.

Turning to look over her shoulder, Astrid had seen her mother climbing back down the ridge. Her mother’s shoulders had seemed huge to her, and unwavering, as a parent’s shoulders can often seem so certain and so strong to a child.

The rank stink of death filled the hold. It had filled it long ago. She’d smelled it as she leapt down the steps, taking them two at a time even as the snow wetted the wood. How could she slow when Hiccup was there? Then she had smelled it, that death.

The lamp, too, died. The candle extinguished. Darkness swept through the room. Astrid turned. She kept her glove. She took the ax with her, too. The sleet nailed her face; she ducked as she climbed the steps to the deck. Dagur’s crumpled body lay headless and silent and reaching for someone to help him out from under the dragon, its throat split open. They could neither of them hurt anymore.

The wind dragged at her hair as she clambered out on the deck again. She gathered her braid and her tangled, loose hair to one side and tucked the lot into her collar, as she squinted into the storm, looking for Toothless or Hiccup or one of Dagur’s men. The men were as she’d left them, tied together by the mast. She crossed to them first. In the wilds of the snowstorm, another fireball burst, lighting the silhouette of another ship.

“Dagur’s dead,” she told the men. She cut through the rope with her ax, a single driving motion that buried the head in the deck. The two men nearest flinched away on either side.

“You killed him?” one of the men shouted.

Astrid jerked the ax free. That smell wallowed in her mouth, the smell of old rot and of new blood. Dagur’s hand was down there, still reaching.

“Yes,” she said, “I killed him. And unless you want to die too you should signal one of those other ships to pick you up. The storm’s only going to get worse.”

None of the men looked to be weeping for Dagur. Her stomach sat weirdly. A man stood slowly, his hands gripping his knees then his thighs. His face was cracked, red, the skin peeling away in white layers.

“We’re going to die anyway,” he said flatly.

Astrid shrugged and shouldered the ax. “It’s your choice when. Now, or later. If you follow us?” she said, spinning around in the thickening sleet to face them. She brought her ax down. “Now.”

The men stood there, crowded about the mast with their faces red-rashed and their eyes bleak and the winter come to gather them up. A great sheet of flame twisted along the wind, high above them all: Hookfang had lost his temper. Snotlout and the Nightmare’s shadow flashed through the fire, and then only the flame remained, torn to brilliant shreds by the ferocity of the wind, ripping at everything it touched.

Toothless sang in the dark and she went to him. The deck was slippery; she kept her feet beneath her. The ice stung her skin, little arrows punching at her face. Astrid tugged her fur collar up. He resolved black in the whiteness, his scales gleaming as he lowered his head to meet her approach. She cupped her hand to his nose and said, “I know. I told you we’d find him,” and Toothless puffed a hot breath that warmed her palm under the blood-wet wool. He looked at her, his pupils narrow. What was she to tell him?

“Later,” Astrid said. She rounded him. 

Hiccup was sprawled in the saddle. His hair hung like a curtain, obscuring his cheek as he leaned heavily over the saddle horn. Her chest seized. 

“Hiccup,” she said. “Hiccup!” She gripped his knee. The joint was knobby; it fit in her hand. She’d an ill-defined thought, of Hiccup on the deck below-decks with his hand stretched out to her. Her throat seized, too. She spoke through the tightness.

“Are you all right?”

His head rose. His hair, slicked with ice and, she thought now with alarm, with freezing sweat, clung to his cheeks, his brow; a small red-brown curl kissed the corner of his eye. He looked blearily not at her but at the ax she clutched, the head of it high. Her fingers dug into his trouser leg. His thigh was lean, corded when he ran or flew; the muscle had laxed.

“Hiccup,” she said. She squeezed his knee. The cap shifted under her palm. She thought of Dagur’s hands, closed around Hiccup’s throat, and Hiccup looking over Dagur’s shoulder at her as if she were the sun rising, even as Dagur crushed the life in him.

“Hiccup!” 

He startled. His gaze flew up. He met her eyes. Some horrid tension in his cheeks eased, and the furrow in his brow smoothed. His eyes shone. Fever, she thought. The hand at his knee wanted to cup his jaw instead, the fingers knotted in his trouser leg longing to sweep the hair flattened along his face behind his ear. 

“I’m fine,” he said, his voice made low by the bruising soon to darken his throat. He jerked his head back, rather like Toothless. “Let’s get out of here.”

Her glove had left a bloody smudge on his trouser leg. Astrid hopped up into the saddle behind him. Toothless warbled and stretched his wings, working the kinks out. She got the ax stowed away. Hiccup was bent over the saddle horn again, this time checking the saddle. It was no more a comment on her flying or what he thought she might have done to the saddle than if she checked her ax—her own ax—after lending it to Hiccup. He was familiarizing it, finding normality in this. His back was thin before her, and a shiver ran through him without stopping. She slipped her hand around his waist. She wanted to drag his back to her and hold him till he stopped shivering.

“We have to get the others,” she called to Hiccup.

They took off, flying not against but with the wind. Astrid hooked her arms together around Hiccup, her hands knotted at his belly. The expanse of his slender back fit to her chest. She tucked her chin to his shoulder, so that her fur collar would mask at least one side of his neck. Her eyes narrowed; she peered through her eyelashes into the dark. Sleet danced. Her eyelashes were brittle with ice.

Toothless circled the fleet, spiraling higher as he went. Hiccup said, “All right, bud,” and Toothless spat a plasma bolt into the sky. It erupted, spilling white-blue light that illuminated the whole of the world, it seemed, for the moment before the squall swallowed that light too: the ships below, Astrid holding Hiccup on Toothless, the cold and far off horizon where the black sea met the black sky. Hiccup tipped his head back to follow the flare, the ripple of light shivering out of it as he shivered, his back trembling against Astrid.

“We flew about six hours to get here,” Astrid shouted. “Going back we’ll be flying into the wind, so that’s another couple hours. Are you going to be all right?”

Hiccup trailed his hand over hers, laced together under his chest. Astrid looked at the shell of his ear, bright red, burnt by the cold.

“If I can’t fly,” he said, “you know how to fly Toothless. So it’s going to be fine.”

“I think he prefers you.”

Hiccup laughed. She wondered if it surprised him as much as it did her. She’d seen his face as he stared at that dragon, down in the hold of the flagship. Astrid laid her cheek against his shoulder. The very tip of her nose brushed his neck.

“I think,” Hiccup said, “he prefers _not_ free falling into the ocean where all three of us will slowly and painfully freeze to death.”

She wiggled her face in her collar to free her lips. “Or drown,” she said to his ear.

“Or drown.”

The laugh had gone. It was a mercy, she thought. His hand covered her hand again. He wore the gloves. She knew his touch as something muffled, at a distance. Nearer than this to her, she heard the steady whiffing sound of wings beating, and above that a chuckling snarl countered by another much like it. Astrid drew her hands from Hiccup’s belly; his fingers tightened around her wrist then let go. His neck, bent, showed. Lifting her head off his back, she grasped his shoulders and stood in the saddle.

“Here!” she shouted. She waved twice, her fingers spread and palm flat. 

Toothless spat another ball. The Zippleback twisted around the rippling fire, Barf dragging Ruffnut face-first through the thinnest finger of flame there on the outskirts. She cackled and swiped at her face, rubbing ash out of her eyes and nose and mouth. 

“Ha!” said Tuffnut. The long ties of the knitted hat bounced over his shoulders. “I didn’t know you could fart out of your _face_.”

Ruffnut pointed her knees and Barf swung sharply so that she could smash her sooty hand into Tuffnut’s face.

“You found the chicken stick?” Ruffnut said. She pushed the helmet up her brow with her thumb. Ash streaked her cheek. 

“You traded hats?” said Astrid.

Ruffnut shrugged. “Do you know how embarrassing it’d be, having to drag his headless body around Berk?”

“ _I_ know,” Tuffnut said, flipping the left ear of the hat out of his eyes. “I bet it’s like having to drag your butt around. Oh, wait, you don’t _have_ a butt.”

Hiccup turned to them. His chapped ear faced Astrid, then his hair whipped to hide it.

“You guys came?” 

“Um, obviously,” said Tuffnut. He gestured to himself. “I’m right here. Right?”

“Astrid said we’d get to blow stuff up,” Ruffnut said, “plus you’re way better at being a no-fun buzz-kill than Astrid is.”

Barf and Belch fell in beside Toothless, though Belch snapped at Barf for pushing. Toothless growled at them. Tuffnut made a performance out of scrubbing soot from his face.

“And you’re easier to make fun of.”

“You’re not as scary.”

“I’m scarier than Astrid is, though,” Tuffnut said.

“We weren’t worried about you.”

“I don’t worry about anything,” Tuffnut said, “I’m not _Hiccup_.”

Astrid made a fist and held it under his nose, and Tuffnut swore as he yanked Belch out of her reach. 

Between the fluttering strands of his hair, she saw Hiccup smile, lopsided, just the faintest line of teeth peeking. Astrid let her fist fall. With the hand still at his shoulder, she brushed his tunic’s neckline, straightening it at his nape, and he looked back at her, just enough that she might see the understanding in how his eye creased. The weight in her gut remained, but she thought her next breath came more readily. The sharp, clean scent of snow strengthened.

“What?” said Ruffnut at Hiccup’s smile. She showed her teeth in turn, sticking her jaw out as she did so. “We didn’t do it for _you_.”

“We did it for the glory,” Tuffnut said, “for the fame.”

“For the anarchy,” Ruffnut said.

“Yeah, yeah,” Hiccup said. He was still smiling. “You think I don’t know that?” He cocked his head and pursed his lips. “Ruff and Tuff, two of the meanest Vikings to ever pillage old Mildew’s cabbages.”

“We _burn_ Mildew’s cabbage,” said Ruff.

“Yeah,” said Tuff, “who wants to pillage _that_ crap? Ha. Crappage.” He elbowed Ruffnut, and she flapped her hand at him, as if to shoo a bug. Tuffnut scowled.

“Anyway,” he said, “we’re cold. Like ice.”

“We definitely don’t care about you.”

“Or anything!” said Tuffnut. “Caring about things is for wimps! And babies!”

“You’re heartless,” said Hiccup, politely indulging. “Friendless.”

“Hatless,” said Astrid, and she lunged to snatch the hat off Tuffnut’s head.

“Hey! My precious ears!”

Astrid pinched Hiccup’s ear and he recoiled, jerking his head back around. Swiftly, Astrid hauled the hat down over his head till it fit him snug. He touched a hand to his ear and made to look at her again. She tapped her knuckles against his shoulder and pointed ahead to the flickering light of a long, sleek tongue of fire bearing upon them through the storm: Hookfang, his skin ignited.

“Tie it under your chin. He hasn’t had anything to cover his ears all day,” she snapped, whacking Tuffnut on the elbow when he tried to steal the hat.

Tuffnut shook his arm out, flopping it at the elbow as though she’d broken the joint. “What are you, his mom or his—”

Ruffnut slammed the helmet over his head and Tuffnut staggered in his seat, lurching. 

“He’s been a _pain_ all day,” Ruffnut said by way of explanation. “A pain in my—”

“Yo! Astrid!” 

Hookfang snarled at them as he rocketed past. Toothless snorted and corrected course to accommodate Hookfang’s more erratic flight. Snotlout flashed them all a salute. He’d pulled on the fireproof cloak Hiccup had designed for him the month before: a large leather coat laid over with scales shed by the Nadders where they nested above Meade Hall. Flames sputtered along Hookfang, the ice sizzling as it melted against his super-heated, fire-riddled scales. Snotlout glimmered blue and green, decked thoroughly in his cloak and grinning as he rode up to meet them. He was red, too, but not with cold.

“Get lost,” said Ruffnut in disgust. 

“Yeah!” said Tuffnut. He knocked the helmet back. “Stop rubbing it in that your dragon can set you on fire!”

“But I’m not on fire,” said Snotlout smugly. “Just nice and _toasty_.”

The smile warmed Hiccup’s voice. “Glad to see you’re testing out the new coat.”

“Glad to see you know how to appreciate a true hero when you see one, cos,” Snotlout preened. “How you liking the rescue? Pretty stylish, huh?”

Astrid spanned the space between Hiccup’s shoulder blades with her hand. His shoulders had hunched. Perhaps the hat hid some of his face. Snotlout gave Astrid no concerned looks. The long curve of Hiccup’s nape was flushed. With gloved hands she couldn’t say how much of it was the cold and how much might be fever, if his skin were slicked or dry, dry enough to begin to peel there. She thought: How long did the rash need to catch? She thought of Dagur’s fingers, flaking on the tips as they curled back toward his half-skinned palms.

“I’d like it more if you’d come sooner,” Hiccup said, with some lightness.

Snotlout spread his hands. “I had to make an entrance!”

Hiccup’s spine was knobbed, his shoulder blades pulled out. Astrid held him, steadying as he fumbled with the ties of the hat.

“Who are you trying to impress?” Ruffnut called.

Her brother cackled. “Is it Ruffnut?”

Snotlout reacted as though someone had thrown hot water in his face. “Ugh! Who wants _Ruffnut?_ ”

“That’s exactly what I’ve been saying,” said Tuffnut triumphantly, “I’m _absolutely_ the twin people want to impress—”

“Nobody wants to impress you—”

“Snotlout!” Astrid shouted. “Do you still have your coat?”

“Yeah, why?”

She jerked her head toward Hiccup. He glanced at her, his head tipped so he could peek at her over his hunched shoulder. The knitted Zippleback’s face leered at Astrid, but Hiccup’s freckled, wind-red face was set in a gentler way. His eyes crinkled.

“A coat _would_ be nice.”

“Ruffnut!” Astrid called, “Where’s Fishlegs?”

“He went down,” Ruffnut said doubtfully, and she held her hand out to the vastness of the ocean, somewhere under the flurry of the storm.

“He said Meatlug was ‘pooped out,’” Tuffnut quoted. “Guess he shouldn’t ride a Gronkle.”

Snotlout popped his head into the cloak and groused, “First my girl, now my coat—is there anything you won’t take from me?” He wriggled under the cloak, pulling his coat off.

“He’s never taken anything from you,” Astrid snapped. If she’d something to throw at Snotlout, she would have.

Hiccup peeked at her again. He smiled shyly, and she colored under her own wind burn.

“We need to find Fishlegs,” she said. 

Hiccup shifted in the saddle to tap Toothless, once at the back of his brow. “One more time, Toothless.”

Toothless hacked low in his throat and then, tossing his head, fired off another bolt. The light washed whitely over the sky, bathing them all in its brightness in the moments before it faded away to simple fire and then, as the wind ripped at it, nothing but a fuzzy afterglow behind the eyelids. Hookfang flickered, a constant signal riding alongside.

“But hey,” said Hiccup, as Snotlout popped his head back out of the cloak, “it’s nice to see all my hard work didn’t go to waste.”

Astrid pinched his shoulder. “Are you gift guilting him?”

“I spent hours picking Nadder scales out of the straw!” Hiccup protested. “I bored all those holes by hand! With a bit!”

“And a hand crank machine you built,” she said.

“By _hand_ ,” he said. His humor was returning, restored by the normalcy of their chatter, the twins avidly tallying scores and Astrid pinching him again and Snotlout admiring himself in the warm glow of Hookfang’s fire. “Which coincidentally is also how I sewed all those scales to the leather. With my hands.”

“I never said I didn’t like it,” Snotlout said. He looked exasperated, like a parent with a child. “I just said I thought it looked like a unicorn fart.”

“Oh,” said Hiccup, “of course. How could I have mistaken that particular comment.” 

Astrid leaned in to Hiccup’s back, tucking her chin to his neck. “Not a unicorn fart,” she murmured in his ear. “Maybe a summer butterfly.”

He turned his face to her; his cheek brushed her nose. “Thank you, Astrid,” he said dryly, but then his eyelashes dropped, and he touched her fingers at his shoulder, and her throat ached.

“That was before I realized how good-looking I am in everything I put on,” Snotlout said. “Here, catch. I don’t want to be chief yet.”

Astrid plucked the coat out of the air and went to bundling Hiccup in it.

“I can dress myself—”

“You’re flying Toothless,” Astrid said. “Hold your arms up.”

“I’m flying Toothless without my arms?” he wondered.

“He just needs you to work the fin. Lift your chin, I need to button this.” 

She hooked her hands under his arms, fixing the buttons business-like all up his chest. Hiccup leaned back into her arms, his shoulders fitting to hers, his shoulder blades flat and bony against her own chest. Swaddled in underclothes and a tunic and a coat on top of that, her breasts were halfway to being as flat; there was no hot thrill to the pressure of Hiccup resting in her arms here, in the cold of the night, the cold of winter. Her heart had contracted painfully. The impulse had struck her as cruelly as a finger slotted between her ribs: to clutch him to her and wrap him in her own coat, her hands holding the front of it closed before him, his head nestled to her collar and her hair a drape to cut out the wind. His breath steady at her chin. Her wrists steady, crossed at his breast. 

The thought returned: how he had looked up at her, his hands on the dragon’s snout, as Astrid told Hiccup to go to Toothless. Her mother had tried to offer Astrid the same mercy, but she had not thought it a mercy. To Astrid then it had seemed a condescending. Was her love for the dog so little that she should not be with him at the last? Perhaps her mother had thought this as Astrid thought it: I wanted to protect you. I wanted to spare you the pain. That’s all.

Astrid flattened her mouth. With gloved fingers she painstakingly slipped each button to its necessary hole. Hiccup smoothed his own hands out flat along Toothless’ head. The motion translated into a subtle shifting of his shoulders, the blades arching, the flat edges pushing out to crush into her breasts. Astrid got a button tucked in the wrong hole just short of his throat and then undid it to try again, struggling with the wind pulling at them and his hair, brushed back, whispering over her lips. In the gloom, with Hookfang’s light fleeing as Snotlout took him over the water in search of Fishlegs, Astrid brushed her lips very, very faintly against the lump of Hiccup’s ear beneath the hat, on the far side where the twins could not see her do it.

She had gone down those steps, so swiftly she had felt as if she flew, and Dagur had his hands around Hiccup’s throat, and Hiccup had looked at her like that—as if she shone—as if he had prayed for her—and she had thought nothing; she had only known a tremendous relief, poured through her as she knew that he was not dead, and a coldness in her chest beyond fear and beyond hate, a harshness rooted in the certainty, as solid as her bones, or the iron rod shot through the ax’s shaft, that in another moment she would have flown down those icing steps to find Hiccup as far beyond fear and hate as a person could go.

Her fingers lingered at the closure beneath his chin. Snotlout’s coat was overly large on Hiccup across the shoulders and chest; the collar bagged open. She frowned and pressed it to his throat. 

Hiccup said, “It’s fine, Astrid,” in his newly rasping voice. His wrists stuck out of the sleeves. Snotlout was thicker around, but Hiccup had the greater height.

“How cold out is it?” She got her finger in the back of the collar and tugged, pulling him back. “And you’re sweating. You have a fever. The last thing you need is more cold air.”

“Hey, Mom,” Tuffnut called, “did you bring any warm soup for him?”

“In what?” said Ruffnut. “Her butt?”

“What’s that?” Astrid leaned out, her hand on his shoulder. “You want to donate your coats, too?”

Hiccup threw his hand behind his waist, catching her knee as she’d risen out of the saddle. The contact was momentary; he hadn’t the mobility in his fingers to squeeze or even to hold her knee.

“Why don’t you two cut Astrid some slack?”

“Sure,” Tuffnut said, grinning catlike, “ _Dad_.”

“Go help Snotlout find Fishlegs,” Astrid snapped.

“Why?” said Ruffnut. Her bared brow wrinkled. The wind thumped her heavy braids together behind her. “He already caught a Fishstick.” She hung from Barf’s neck, stretching her arm down past her head. Her braids, whipped, thumped the Zippleback’s chest, and Belch gnashed.

Astrid leaned further. Her fingers caught in the loose coat; she held tightly to Hiccup. Hookfang ascended, still burning brightly in the hurl and whirl of the blizzard. Fishlegs was hunched with his arms tucked in and his head down as Meatlug valiantly bumbled northerly. 

“Look what I caught,” Snotlout shouted, clearly winding up for a truly awful joke.

“I already made a fish joke,” Ruffnut shouted back with glee, and Snotlout took on a mulish cast, his brow beetling.

“You did good,” Astrid said before he might accuse Ruffnut of what, Astrid couldn’t predict. Often Snotlout could not be redirected. But Snotlout stopped entirely and stared at her with his brow yet heavy over his eyes. Astrid squared her jaw and glowered at him as she elaborated: “You all did good.”

It was Hookfang’s heat that colored Snotlout so red. He said, “Well, of course we did good. You picked me to lead this rescue mission.”

“You let Snotlout lead?” Hiccup called.

Astrid thumped his shoulder. He was grinning back at her, a sort of personal look for her alone that had Astrid sticking her chin up and looking to Fishlegs.

What have you been up to?” she asked him, as Snotlout told Hiccup that of course he’d led the rescue mission; what, he thought any of those other pint-size toddlers could organize something as big as all this?

“We’re older than you, stupid,” said Tuffnut.

“And taller!”

Fishlegs had wound his scarf up around his face, so thoroughly that his eyes were two gleaming slices between two strips. He had to peel the scarf away from his jaw to be heard over the storm.

“I thought we probably didn’t want them following us back to Berk,” he said, “so Meatlug knocked some holes in their ships. I left them one! Not the flagship. I figured there was about a thirty-seven percent chance it wouldn’t be salvageable when Astrid was done with it.”

“It’s still floating!” she said. “But—”

Hiccup’s back tensed. She caught her tongue against the back of her teeth. His head remained facing forward. Dagur’s palm had cracked; his skin peeled in long patches. He’d crushed Hiccup’s throat in his hands. How much of the day had Hiccup wasted in the hold of that plague ship? It wasn’t plague, she thought; but the men aboard the ship had suffered the ravages of some disease, their flesh raw and sore from more than simply the brittle wind the north had summoned. Eyes bright with fever. The man whose arm she had splintered, he’d lost an ear, the hole ringed by a flaking sore and a faint ring of twisted tissue. Had he lost it before the sickness? 

Astrid rounded her hand about his shoulder. Her fingers settled over his breast. Somewhere under that too large coat and the thick cloth of his tunic, his heart must beat.

“We have to take you to Gothi,” she said, as quietly as the wind allowed her. “If it’s what Dagur’s men had—”

“It isn’t,” Hiccup said. His cheek showed, pale under his freckles, under the flush. The brightness of his eyes, she thought. “The guys he sent after me weren’t especially cordial. They left me at the bottom of their boat where I got soaked.”

“You can’t know what it is.”

He shook his head even as she spoke. She brushed his hair from her lips. Her palm settled at the back of his head, cupping the swell as she listened.

“It isn’t that. I’ve had colds before and—”

“Do you know how it starts?” She held his head. Her little finger swept his nape. His neck bent delicately. “Do you know?”

He looked up at her. His eyes were so bright. Snow dashed against his jawline; his skin was slick, with melted snow and soon, perhaps, with ice. She scrubbed at his cheek, his jaw, and then stopped: this was the glove heavy with blood. Hookfang’s light was not so great as to permit her to see if she’d left streaks of blood on his skin. Perhaps it had dried in the wool already.

“It’s not what Dagur had,” Hiccup said. His cheek tightened. His eyes slid away; he looked down, from Astrid to Toothless. “I hope.” He turned. Astrid might have clutched his neck, holding him there, had she managed to dismiss the vision of Dagur squeezing Hiccup as if to pop his head off. How his voice husked now.

“To be safe,” said Hiccup in that roughened voice, “you probably shouldn’t touch me any more than you absolutely have to.”

The cold was like a needle, slipped through her nose to contract beneath her eyes. She breathed deeply in; she let it out. Astrid slung her arms around him. He started and like the winter, she contracted, clasping him to her chest though he had gone so utterly motionless, as if he were ice too. She crossed her hands at the crux of his breast, just south of his collarbone, and laid her cheek against his cheek.

“It’s a little late for that,” Astrid said. 

He sucked his breath in through his nose. When he spoke, he nearly sounded as he usually did—nasal, dry of wit—but for that rasp.

“I might be wrong. But that isn’t really the action of someone who doesn’t want to come down with a mysterious illness.”

“No,” she agreed, “but you don’t have that. Remember? You just have a bad cold.”

He said, “Astrid.

She fisted her hands together and pressed that weight to his chest. His shoulders pushed into her upper arms, awkward enough to dull the feeling in her hands.

“I was down there too,” she said.

“Pretty sure that’s not how it works.”

“Then how does it work?”

“Astrid,” he said again, helplessly, “I don’t want you to get sick too. You didn’t—see Dagur.”

She closed her eyes. Her nose very lightly swept his cheek. The rash had scraped the back of Dagur’s neck so that scabs pocked it, where the skin had cracked or he’d scratched it open. When she had hauled the ax from his back, he’d bled like any man would, darkly and wetly. She’d felt the blood like mist on her lips.

“I saw him,” she said, her lips to Hiccup’s cheek. “You’re telling Gothi as soon as we get back to Berk. And you’re going to drink anything she tells you to drink. Even if it tastes like Snotlout’s socks.”

Hiccup grasped her hands, clasped at his chest. His grip shifted; he held her wrist. The angle dragged her coat sleeve up. The wool of the glove she’d given him to wear scratched her skin.

“I surrender,” he said. “I’ll drink it, even if it does taste like Snotlout’s socks. But you’re going to be drinking it too. That’s the deal.”

“I’ve never turned down a challenge,” Astrid said. “Why would I start now?” She unlaced her fingers, to catch his hand. 

She opened her eyes to find the world much the same as it had appeared before she’d closed them: the night black, the blizzard swirling whitely as it swallowed them all. Astrid craned, judging the trajectory of the storm as it rushed madly about, scattering snow and ice in a constantly twining haze. 

“If the storm gets much worse, we’ll have to land somewhere.”

“So,” said Hiccup, “let’s hope it doesn’t get worse.”

Toothless barked and twisted about, his wings braced to break through the wind. He strained, the powerful muscles lining his back tensing with every stroke. The turbulence knocked at Hiccup, and at Astrid, and as Hiccup pressed his belly flat to Toothless, Astrid sank with him, her arms slipping down to embrace his belly rather than his shoulders. He’d returned both hands to the saddle. Even through the coat she felt his shivering, every shudder rocking through her own chest.

“We need everyone to stay close,” Hiccup said to her. His abused throat could no longer carry his voice much farther than Toothless’ wingspan.

Astrid stuck her hand out, waving. “Fall in!” she bellowed. “Don’t get separated!”

Snotlout yelled: “Hit it, Hookfang!” 

Hookfang snarled and relit, flaring, a beacon around which they gathered, Fishlegs swaddled in his scarf, Barf and Belch twining their necks together so that the twins were pressed arm to arm, Astrid clasping Hiccup to her as they flew on into that unremitting and unwelcoming vastness toward the horizon, unseen, and Berk somewhere beyond that, on the far side of the long night that stretched before them. His back rose with every breath. She rose with it. He breathed. He lived. It was a mercy, Astrid thought; and she held him as the gusts pulled at her hair, mistrals dragging at her shoulders, trying to slip between her chest and his back. The fur collar of her coat stung her cheeks. She exhaled and the wind took her breath from her, a cold cloud dissipating swiftly as it whipped over her shoulder. She hooked her hands together again at his chest, in the sanctuary of that little hollow where the breastbone ended and the rib cage split into wings, and she did not let go. A mercy, necessary.

*

They took to the ground two hours into the flight, or perhaps three hours, or just one. More than that or less: the violence of the storm was such that time had changed form, from a reckoning of things that had passed to a matter of whether one was still alive or not. Hiccup’s shuddering had worsened. He felt it always. His face had frozen and yet he sweltered. It was Astrid who called for them to land somewhere.

“We can’t go any further tonight!” she shouted. 

Fishlegs volunteered to take Meatlug down, to look for one of the many bony islands that littered the ocean here in the archipelago. Meatlug flew sluggishly, bearing Fishlegs bundled and hunched upon her back toward the black and roiling waters. In the indistinct darkness Hookfang glowed. His fire had dwindled till he appeared more an ember than a forest fire, and now even Snotlout was shaking with the cold, his arms folded across his chest. They lowered, Hookfang dropping farthest, so as to stay somewhat with Fishlegs as he and Meatlug rode into the night.

Ghosts came for Hiccup from the whiteout. He saw them moving there, watchful in the layers between the ice, those little spaces between one flake and another. If Dagur watched, Hiccup did not see him. He saw a gaunt thing, a whisper of motion, that he thought might be his mother, and he knew it was the fever that he saw and not his mother’s face, a face he could no more recall than the sound of her voice, and yet surely that was Valka’s hand, her fingers long and pale, reaching for him from out of his white and misting breath. The fingers curled. She’d a rash on her palm, dry skin, peeling. He breathed raggedly, ice in his throat. Dagur, his head gone, his shoulders mangled and bloodied, clutched Hiccup around the neck. The water closed around Hiccup’s head. He sank. 

Someone was clinging to him. Someone bore him to their chest. “Stay awake,” they pleaded. Astrid. “Hiccup, you have to stay awake. Don’t you dare go to sleep!”

He had lost his leg. She was carrying him to Berk in her arms. Ash littered the sky. He had done that. He had killed the Red Death. Painted across his eyelids he saw it, that great and ancient dragon, collared in the hold of a ship and staring at him with its eyes huge and alien and its leg twisted beneath it and it was Hiccup who had done this. His eyes were open. Not ash: snow.

“I’m awake,” he said. He thought he’d said it. He didn’t know the voice. Too rough. 

“We’re landing soon,” Astrid said, and her hands were the hands, gloved, that rested on his cheek and on his waist. The wool scratched his face. “We’re getting out of the storm, so you have to stay with me. Just until we set down. Do you understand? Hiccup. Please. Hiccup!”

“Toothless,” he said. “Is Toothless okay?” He had seen Toothless falling, plummeting to the unyielding waves that waited to break against the rocks, to drag them all inevitably under.

“He’s right here. He’s fine.”

Hiccup leaned forward. He set his cheek against Toothless’ head. Toothless huffed. He cocked his head, so that one of his flaps brushed across Hiccup’s face. The leathery skin beneath the fin passed over him.

“I was worried about you, buddy,” Hiccup said to him. He stroked that fin, petting Toothless as Toothless had petted him. “I thought I’d lost you. How’d you make it out of that?”

“He was lucky,” said Astrid.

Hiccup turned, scrubbing his nose on Toothless’ nape. “I’m sorry I hurt you. I didn’t—well. I guess I did mean to do it. I’m sorry.” He’d torn that tail fin when he’d shot Toothless down, over land and not the sea. Relief unspooled in his chest, a thread woven through the heavier guilt. If Toothless had gone down over the water, he would have died. There was something odd in that, he thought. When had he shot Toothless down?

“He’s all right,” Astrid said, a frown on her tongue, “but you aren’t—Hiccup, you’re sweating. And if you close your eyes one more time, I swear, I’ll make you _eat_ Snotlout’s socks.”

He smiled. Toothless’ scales were cool against his burning cheek; or perhaps it was the bones that burned and not his skin. 

“Why—why would you ever do that?”

“For dying,” she said, “and for worrying me, and for everything else on top of that.”

“I’m not dying,” he said. His eyes were heavy. His everything was heavy. “Not unless you make me eat Snotlout’s socks. Then I’d probably die. Not a good death. Not a warrior’s death.” His dad would be disappointed. Hiccup felt at his chest, but he couldn’t feel the pendant to Eir. Had he forgotten it? 

He heard his father, rumbling downstairs: “Leave me the boy. O, Odin. Spare him. Spare Hiccup. Don’t take Valka’s boy from me. Please,” said Stoick, never humble, in prayer, “please. Leave me my son.”

“You won’t have a pyre.” Her scratchy glove was rough on his brow. She wiped the hair back from his eyes and then drew the hat down over his forehead again. “We’ll have to bury you in the ground. So you can’t die yet.”

“I wouldn’t see you when you die,” Hiccup said. “You’ll go to Valhalla, and I’d sit at Hel’s table with—with all the other great screw-ups in history. And Snotlout’s socks.”

“You aren’t a screw-up,” said Astrid fiercely. Just a week ago, he thought, she had looked coldly at him and said, “He’s never where he should be,” but there was a vagueness to it, as though it had happened long ago. 

“You have to make something up,” he said. “Tell them I died—fighting off four Night Furies with my bare hands. I heroically saved all of Berk from destruction.”

She fussed with his coat, though he suspected it wasn’t his coat at all. It was too large at the shoulders for one and for another thing, his hands stuck out the sleeve, and thirdly it smelled awful. She folded the collar over, bundling it at his throat, and left her hand there, holding it shut.

“You already did that.”

“I did?”

“You did,” said Astrid, “although I helped. We all helped. You can’t take all the glory.”

He frowned. “Why not? I’m running a little short on it.”

“Not anymore.” 

She sounded amused. When had Astrid last laughed at something he’d said to her? Yesterday, he thought, but surely that couldn’t be right. They hadn’t been friends for ages, though, fair, they had never been terribly close. Yesterday. What was it yesterday? They were arguing how to do one of the old dances, a complicated kicking dance that had come into vogue once again and then come up in their conversation. How? Astrid had said she thought the dance silly: it looked too much like Stormfly’s greeting ritual. He’d tried to demonstrate how the dance differed but only tripped himself into the dirt. Astrid had laughed as she helped him up, her wide face scrunching.

“You get the idea,” he’d said, red in the face.

“Oh, yeah,” Astrid had said, still laughing, not giggling. Astrid never giggled. “You’re right. Stormfly hardly ever falls down at the end.”

Yesterday. 

“Now you’re a glory hog,” she said.

“Me?” His head was clearing, slowly, like washing a bowl clean of thick soup. “That doesn’t sound like me.”

“You just can’t let anyone else save Berk.”

She had come for him. He had known she would. He reached for her hand. Her fingers cupped his shoulder. Yellow flowers decorated the wrist of his gloves. Those were Astrid’s gloves. They fit his hands snugly. 

“You’re always saving me,” said Hiccup, his hand on her hand, “so what does that make you?”

He couldn’t see her face. His head hurt too much to turn. Astrid’s hand squeezed his shoulder. She leaned forward. A weight pressed against him: she’d rested her head on his back, her forehead tucked to his nape. 

“Stay awake,” she said to him. “Just stay awake. If you go to sleep, you’ll die. And I can’t rescue you from that.”

“You could,” he said. He couldn’t see her face and yet he saw her, standing in the doorway, limned in ice, her hair wild like a summer sun burning over the sea, her cheeks rubbed red and raw. “You’re Astrid. Remember?”

She said, “Even the gods can’t bring back the dead, Hiccup.”

The ghosts walked on through the snow. They watched. They were waiting. How would he know Valka if he saw her? He was awake now. He remembered. His joints hurt. His bones were sore. Flu hit like that, without warning. 

“How far do we have left to go?”

Astrid hesitated. “I’m not sure. A ways. The storm’s made it harder to figure out. The landmarks— But we’re going to set down and wait for a lull as soon as Fishlegs finds somewhere we _can_ set down. I sent Stormfly to find Stoick, so they’ll be looking for us.”

How far had they come? She wasn’t sure of that either.

The weariness pulled at him. He had left her to the work of killing the Pox. He wondered if this was how the dragon had felt, so tired. Its eyes had gleamed in the little light the lamp afforded them, and he had left it as he had left Astrid. 

“Keep talking,” he said. “Please. Just keep talking.”

She was quiet. Out there in the pitch night, Hookfang glowed dully. How far gone? How far yet to go? The long lean winter had come to eat the archipelago, and here they were blue and shivering, gathered around the weakening flames that the wind raked off Hookfang’s scales. What Hiccup knew of the world and the directions it contained was reduced by the totality of the blizzard to this simple reality: keep your head down and out of the wind. Clench your teeth to stop the chattering. His face numb. Astrid a weight on his back, rooting him when he would have drifted. Toothless knew the way. Trust in that. 

“You have to promise to listen,” Astrid said. That, too, was a root: the husk of her voice, the softness that lay beneath it.

“When have I ever not listened to you?”

She rapped his shoulder. There was a softness in that too, if you knew where to look for it.

“Heather,” she said.

“I was right about her, though.”

“I was right, too,” said Astrid, “and you still didn’t listen to me. You didn’t trust me.”

“I trust you,” he protested.

“ _Now_ you trust me,” she said. “But you didn’t. You didn’t trust me with Toothless either.”

“Assuming my memory is still good,” said Hiccup, “you did immediately try to run and tell everyone else.”

Toothless snorted. The twins had drawn near to Snotlout, the double heads of Barf and Belch bent together so that in the bewildering haze of sleet they appeared a double image, like Ruffnut and Tuffnut, indistinguishable from the back but for the helmet Tuffnut wore and the sharper line of Ruffnut’s shoulders, unseen at a distance but remembered. 

Astrid laid her head on his shoulder again. How long had he waited for her? He was just a boy, a child lying in the snow, and Astrid was standing over him and scowling, and then she gave him her hand to help him up and he took it.

“And you were going to run away,” Astrid said, “instead of even trying to talk to anyone.”

He had wanted to protect Toothless. That was all. He had thought, There’s nothing I can do. His father wouldn’t listen. He wasn’t what his father thought him to be, or what his father wanted of a son. What would Valka have wanted? Sometimes as a very small child he had lain awake at night looking at the rafters over his bed and he had imagined what his mother would be like if the dragons hadn’t taken her: kind, like his father said, but stubborn too, never afraid to scold Stoick. She wouldn’t be afraid of anything. That winter when he was sick, so sick his father prayed to the gods for his life, Hiccup had dreamed his mother’s ghost came to sit with him for a time, that she held his sweating face in her hands and told him not to be afraid. It was all right. Whatever happened would happen. Just let it be.

“She died,” Stoick had told Hiccup the once, the only time he ever spoke of that night to Hiccup, “protecting you.”

So, he had gone to the clearing meaning to fly Toothless away from Berk, to go out into the world. That was all you could do. You protected those you loved. At any cost, you protected them. After that last test Stoick had clapped Hiccup’s shoulders and smiled at him, so widely Stoick’s eyes had been nearly swallowed by his creasing cheeks, and Hiccup had known that Stoick would kill Toothless and that he would do it meaning to protect Hiccup, to protect Berk. Any cost. The war would go on as it had gone on for generations. What was Toothless’ life to the life of any other dragon that had died? A dragon had taken Hiccup’s mother. What was Toothless’ life to Valka’s life?

Stoick had said, “You’ve made me so proud,” as he beamed at Hiccup, his hand a stone on Hiccup’s shoulder. Would Valka have been proud? What would she have wanted of Hiccup that day in the woods when he found Toothless, bound and helpless, his wings hobbled, his tail torn? He hadn’t thought of her then. He hadn’t thought of his father. The Night Fury had closed its eyes and turned its head away, showing Hiccup its throat. 

You protect those you love.

Hiccup said, “I thought it was a good plan.”

“It was a stupid plan. It wasn’t even a plan.”

“Is this your idea of keeping me awake?” Hiccup asked. “Arguing with me?”

She was smiling. He felt her lips curling at his neck. Her hands were bunched in the coat. She’d come for him. If he had gone then, as he’d meant to, would she have followed?

“It’s working, isn’t it?”

They’d scooped her up and dropped her in that tree. Astrid had glared at him as she scrabbled to get up onto the branch. Her hair in her face, her nose flared, her jaw set: she had never been farther from him than in that moment when he held his hands out to her and begged for her to listen, and she had shouted, “I don’t want to hear anything you have to say.” He had wished for so long that she would look over her shoulder at him, when she passed the forge. He had hoped for her to see him as he saw her. What right had he held, to ask for her attention? His father had prayed for Hiccup, and Hiccup had prayed for Astrid, and looking at her as she bit her lip and got her feet on the branch, Hiccup had thought: I’m no better. Ask a person to change for you. Make of them what you want. No one had that right.

In the snow, ghosts stood watchful. The sea gave up her ghouls in winter. How many had died in these deep, strange waters? Men, dragons: their souls walked the silt beneath the waves, and when the storms came they rose out of the depths with seaweed in their hair and their flesh or scales sloughed off, to take of the living what they had lost. Give up what you have. You have no more right to it than anyone else. His mother wouldn’t walk with them. If he saw her in the turning of the snow and the ice, it was because he wanted to see her there. Dagur would be there. He would walk the sea floor without his head, there in the lightless, lifeless wastes of the ocean. Dagur, who had forced Hiccup’s head under the water: Dagur, who no god could change. 

“And besides,” said Astrid, “that worked out in the end. Maybe if you’d trusted me from the start…”

He unfurled his hands, beneath the sleeked rim of Toothless’ head fins. Toothless wiggled them over Hiccup’s wrists. Forget the ghosts, he thought. Remember the living. Astrid’s old gloves were tight around his thumbs.

“Would you have listened to me?”

“No,” she said. Perhaps she remembered it too, here in the snow. Her nose brushed the corner of his jaw. “Not then.”

“Because I was a screw-up.”

She pinched his side through the baggy coat and Hiccup wiggled away, arching. Snotlout’s coat: he should have recognized that sweaty smell. 

“Not because of that,” she said. “Or—well, yes. You don’t understand.”

“I do. Believe me—enough people explained it to me over the years. I get it.”

“You don’t,” Astrid snapped at his ear. “It wasn’t that I didn’t like you. It’s just that, you were the chief’s son. You are the chief’s son. It didn’t matter how often you screwed up, because you always got a second chance. I had _one_ chance to prove that I was good enough.”

“I didn’t want it.” 

She scoffed. “You wanted it.”

“I wanted to kill a dragon?” He laid his hand over Toothless’ shoulder.

Astrid pinched him again. “Not that. You wanted the glory. You liked it when everyone started paying attention to you and following you around and thinking you were the best Viking Berk has ever turned out.”

“And you wanted to punch me in the gut,” he said, “I remember.”

She exhaled angrily. “That’s still not it. That’s part of it. But it’s not the whole thing. It’s… You were so nice. Sarcastic, yeah, but you used to just let people walk all over you—”

“I didn’t let them walk all over me—”

Toothless warbled, and Hiccup said, “I _didn’t_. I just wasn’t—you know, beefy enough to ever hit Snotlout back. And not bounce off and hit myself in the face.”

“You have no idea how annoying it was to watch,” Astrid said. “You just … sitting there and mumbling to yourself whenever someone made fun of you, or pushed you around, or said something about you to Stoick when you were right there next to him. It was like you didn’t _care_ what they did to you. What any of us did to you.”

The first time he had played with Dagur, Dagur had pushed Hiccup into the dirt and laughed. Stunned, Hiccup had sat there a moment. He was five. He hadn’t known then that he was weak. So he’d shot to his feet and tried to shove Dagur over. Dagur was older, larger, stronger. He pushed Hiccup down again and sat on him and grabbing Hiccup’s wrists he had forced Hiccup to slap himself. The next time they met, a year later, Hiccup knew better than to fight. Survive it. Live through this.

His face burned him. His hands burned. The wind cut. They were all of them flying through a great emptiness towards more of the same. He was a boy in the snow and Astrid was standing over him. He was a boy in the forge, and Astrid was running past the window. He was a boy, his head under the water, and here was Astrid, pulling Dagur’s hands from Hiccup’s throat so he could breathe again. She had never been there to pull Dagur off him. Just a common girl, like any other. If she had been there, he thought.

“Did you care?” he asked her. 

He wanted to hide from the neediness of it, to bury his face in the hollow behind Toothless’ crest of fins. How long would that boy still live inside him? He saw it going on and on, as endless as this frigid night, a lifetime of doubt and recrimination. A knot clenched his gut, his chest. What did it matter if she had cared then? She cared now. She did. He knew that she cared. 

Astrid pressed her forehead to his shoulder. Her lips had left his throat. A length of her hair, dragged by the gale, lashed his cheek.

“Yes,” she said at last. “I didn’t want to. But I did.”

He could have laughed at that. He did laugh. His throat ached, and he coughed. He hid his face after all, seeking a comfort in Toothless’ steadiness. When Toothless rumbled, worried, his neck vibrated; it coursed through Hiccup’s skin, a shivering he felt more in his bones than his numbed face.

“Well,” he said, “that was candid.”

She lifted her head. Her chest remained, solid at his back. Her hands remained, latched together beneath his breastbone.

“I _didn’t_ want to,” she said hotly. “I couldn’t. Hiccup—” Her fingers worked in the coat. She cast about. “I couldn’t care. I’d worked so long to be the best. And even if everyone called you useless, you were still the chief’s son.”

He saw her again, after Gothi had determined that Hiccup should face the Nightmare: how her lips had whitened. How she’d glared thunderously at Hiccup. He had wanted the glory. He had wanted, too, to impress Astrid, and instead her seeming indifference had given way to something prideful and furious. 

“It didn’t matter what you did,” she said. “You—you set fire to the docks, and let the dragons get away with a fourth of the sheep, and you still got into dragon training. Do you have any idea how hard I had to work to get there? And then you just got in? Gods! I didn’t want to care. I wanted to hate you.”

They had pulled something out as they spoke, something like that look she’d had when Gothi smiled at Hiccup, or the weight of his father’s hand on his shoulders, or how Toothless had laid his head down in the dirt and waited for Hiccup to split the dragon’s throat. He thought of Dagur, then, and how he had used to laugh as Hiccup struggled, and he thought of Astrid lurching through the doorway with the snow in her hair and an ax in her hand and her lips blue with cold as she spotted Hiccup. She had helped him out of the snow when the twins had shoved him there, once long ago in their shared childhood. She hadn’t always helped him up. She had never laughed.

“But you didn’t hate me,” he said.

She sighed. He thought she sighed. The wind made it hard to hear, to see, to trust in one’s senses. Toothless, he was there. Hiccup could trust that. Astrid’s hands, cradling his chest: he could trust this too.

“I wanted to,” she said.

He wanted to ask it of her then. He wanted to know, as Hookfang flickered, and the twins huddled together, and Toothless groused, grumbling in his throat at the way the wind drove into his eyes.

He said instead, “If I _had_ left. Back then. When I’d meant to. If you hadn’t found me with Toothless…”

What did he want her to say? More than once, more than twice he had considered it, that path she had unknowingly stopped him from taking. If he would have died when winter inevitably came the month after, or if he would have come back again when he thought he could face his father. If he would have figured out what to say and how to say it so that Stoick would listen to him. If perhaps the Red Death would have called out that first night and Toothless would have gone to that dead island of stones, if that was where he might have lost more than his leg, Toothless more than a fin. Instead she had discovered him in his harness with Toothless and he had offered her his hand and Astrid had knocked it away and climbed on to Toothless’ back on her own. The roads untraveled spiraled out like the roots of a tree, and who was to say which he might have taken? In another place, Valka lived, and in another perhaps Hiccup had killed Toothless in the woods, but he doubted that he would have done so. 

“But you didn’t leave,” Astrid said.

“Haven’t you ever thought about it?”

She shook her head. Her nose rubbed his shoulder. “No.”

“You’ve never thought about it? Not even once?”

“It didn’t happen,” she said. “You didn’t leave. Why does it matter to you?”

He lifted his head. Twisting, stiffly, he turned left to look at her, his shoulders angled so that his left shoulder rose and the right fell. Astrid’s hands slid, settling on his hips rather than around his chest.

“Doesn’t it matter to you?” he asked.

She stared at him. Her eyes were dark, not blue but shadows, pooling in her poorly illuminated face. What did she look for in his face? What did she see? Her lips parted. She compressed them again. The snow, the sleet, the gusting wind all ran cold fingers through her hair. Her braid had come largely undone, wilder than any ghost he imagined walking the blizzard. There was blood still on her jaw, dried to her skin. Hesitatingly he risked his balance, to raise his hand to her jaw. His thumb covered that stain, the last of Dagur. 

“Astrid,” he said.

He thought: I stabbed Dagur. Like leading the Red Death to its demise. He had done it. Astrid would have killed Dagur; if the Pox had not taken Dagur’s head, Astrid would have taken it. Dagur had not seen her but Hiccup had heard her feet on the ice and he had known that Dagur, too, would hear it. What would Dagur have done to her? He’d thrown his sword away, discarded all arms but those he meant to use to choke the life out of Hiccup. She would have cut him down. Hiccup hadn’t needed to drive the pry bar into Dagur’s throat and yet: he had done it. Seeing Astrid in that doorway, ringed with snow, bright with ice, Hiccup had stabbed Dagur. His mother had died to protect him. That was what his father said.

“If you had left,” said Astrid. “Then. If you’d left then.”

One of the yellow flowers embroidered about the wrist of the glove had frayed. A bit of thread stuck out. It had iced. Astrid had brought him gloves.

“You wouldn’t have followed me,” Hiccup said.

She said, “How could I?” Ever practical, Astrid. 

“If I left now,” he said.

His fingers were numb. He wondered if he’d lose them. Her lips had chapped. Even that fur collar of hers could not stop the wind from drying her skin.

“You wouldn’t,” she said.

She was right. He knew this was so. She was often right, as he was also often right, even at times when they argued. More than one truth could exist at a time. The hour when he might have left had gone, and it had gone nearly two years ago. So many things had changed but as he looked at her with his shoulders twisted and his hand on her jaw and her eyes so dark and her fingers clutching his waist like an anchor to keep him there, he wondered how much had really changed. Here they were same as they had been. Here inside of his chest was the same boy who, sick with fever, had marveled to know his father loved him so much he would pray to the gods.

What did he want her to say? All the things a child always wanted someone to say to them: Don’t go. Please stay. If you left, I’d find you. Her hair thrashed. If you went, I’d go with you. And where would Astrid go if she went in his stead? If it were her hour of leaving and not his, would she look back at him and ask him to follow? 

He said, “If I did,” when he should have said something else. His throat hurt too fiercely for it. Maybe he was still a coward. Survive this, too.

Her cracked lips parted again. Astrid lifted her hand from his waist. As he cupped her jaw, she cupped his jaw. This was the singular truth of the world: her gloved hand rough, distantly so, on his chilled face. His skull pulsed with heat. The wind had dried her face, made her cheeks so red, and not the plague Dagur had carried with him. Please, oh, god, Stoick had prayed. Please. My god.

Astrid wrapped her arm around his chest, as she had when she carried him to Berk on the back of Stormfly, his leg gone and the stump cauterized with dragon fire, blood soaked through his trouser leg, tied off below his knee. She held him to her. He leaned, unable not to lean. His head, hot, heavy, set on her shoulder. The divine truth at the heart of it all was Astrid saying, “Hiccup.” It was this, and it was Toothless, steady as the daily course of the sun, calling out to him, and it was the lullaby his mother must have sung to him when he was a babe, before she had gone, and it was his father praying. O, my god. Let us survive this. Stay awake. Please stay awake.

“Stay awake!” said Astrid, and she slapped his face. She did it again. Her voice caught. “Hiccup! Keep your eyes open!”

“They’re open,” he said. “When did I ever close them?”

“Just now,” she said. “You did it again. You have to stay with me. Don’t go. Stay with me. Right here.”

“I’m here,” he said.

She said, “What would you have done if you had left then?” and she said it desperately. “Tell me. What were you planning to do?”

His eyelids dragged. All his body dragged. 

“I just wanted to keep Toothless safe.”

“What else? Where were you going? Hiccup. Hiccup!”

He was warm, listening to Astrid speak, listening as she said his name. He’d never particularly liked his name. Who wants to be a hiccup? His mother had given it to him and his father had kept it. The name was tradition for a child like Hiccup. Astrid said, “Hiccup,” and he was glad for it.

Then she cracked him across the face again. He startled. 

“If you go to sleep again,” she yelled, “I’ll drag you out of Hel’s house myself.”

“You can’t do that,” he said.

“I can,” she said, “and I would. All right? If you left, I’d find you and I’d hit you over the head for being a ninny and I’d drag you back.”

He studied her neck, the shape of it beneath her collar, how the fur framed her throat, the manner in which the muscles moved under the skin when she shouted at him.

“Are you telling me this because you think I’ll forget it?”

“I’m telling you it because I need you to stay awake,” said Astrid. She clutched him to her chest. Her mouth was in his hair. “Please. Just a little longer.”

“Okay,” he said.

He drifted again, and again Astrid slapped him. She yelled for Toothless to shoot bolts, and he did; the heat washed over them in waves, each bolt cracking in the cold air like how the iced over bay would crack in spring. The ghosts had come back. Astrid had driven them away but they had only waited till they’d strength enough to face her again. They were waiting still. They were always waiting. Since the day Dagur had first decided to let Hiccup come up for air, they had been waiting. He didn’t want to die. Who would take care of Toothless? Who would listen to his father’s prayers? 

“You aren’t dying,” Astrid said. “You just have a cold. We’re going to have a fire when we land.”

Fishlegs returned. He’d found a small wooded island, with a deep recess behind a boulder that jutted against the wind. That was where Hiccup woke again, not from sleep but the gripping fog that accompanied high fever. They were huddled about the fire, all of them together: Ruffnut and Tuffnut tucked on either side of Fishlegs, Snotlout burrowed beneath Hookfang’s chin, the dragons encircling them and the fire roaring at the heart of the ring, dead wood burning hotly. Astrid’s arms were around Hiccup. He crooked his fingers, and they bent, gradually. He got his arm about her waist. Astrid pressed her face to his hair. Her nose was at his ear. Her breath was at his jaw.

He had lived through this once before. He had come around again, turned about somehow in the blizzard till he sat here in the ice with Astrid, their arms wound around each other so that what little heat they each possessed they might share. Crazy, to use their bodies like that. Astrid, in his recollection, swept her long bangs from her eyes and looked away from him. Here, in this now, her hair was tangled and slick against his face. He watched her heart beating in her throat. The fire croaked, a long log spitting sparks as it broke in two. The gushing fire lit up Snotlout’s face. Snotlout had not been there in the ice. 

This is a different time, he thought. He blinked, forcing his eyes wide as he focused. He had not dreamt the last year and a half. He had not dreamt Dagur, or the Pox. Smoke billowed in a dark cloud, out to where the blizzard swallowed it. Toothless was coiled about Astrid and Hiccup; his tail curled about them; his wings were arched as canopies. He gazed at Hiccup and grunted. His legs shifted. He nosed Hiccup’s side. The world had a quality of a-reality to it. Hiccup blinked again. Frost showered from his eyebrows. This is real, he thought. He did not dream this. Heavily he settled against Toothless, and Toothless sighed as he bolstered Hiccup upon his head.

“We have to stay awake,” Hiccup said out loud.

Astrid’s breath huffed at his throat. “Yeah,” she said. “We do.”

He followed the finite progress of a spark, darting from the fire to dash against Toothless’ leg. Astrid had settled on Hiccup, as he’d settled on Toothless, and the fur of her collar brushed his chin. Another spark fizzled out on the spoke at the end of Hiccup’s peg leg. The skin under the cuff had torn, the wet skin made fragile, but the small pains of burst blisters had faded. A gift, from the cold that had his truncated shin bone aching as though in a vise. The fire lit Astrid’s hair hot as the sun in summer setting behind the grain fields of the low valley. She turned. Her lips were a moment at the soft skin behind his earlobe; then they’d passed, and she rested at his shoulder. The sad and frazzled remainder of her braid gleamed faintly. 

“The explosions,” he said. “Back with the fleet. How did you do that? It wasn’t dragon fire.”

“That was them,” said Astrid, shrugging.

Tuffnut had given Ruffnut the helmet. She grinned wanly at them, the helmet pulled as far down as it would go. Fishlegs’ arm was around her shoulders and she’d shrunk beneath it, her gangly limbs all drawn up to her chest. Barf’s head rested on top of hers.

“That was my idea.”

Tuffnut had all but vanished between Snotlout and Fishlegs. “Our idea.”

“Whatever,” said Ruffnut. “We used some of the balloons from the academy.”

“Stuck ‘em in my vest before we left,” Tuffnut said.

“Got Barf to breath in ‘em.”

“I brought the boom,” Snotlout said.

“Yeah,” Ruffnut said, her grin sharpening, “good thing you never wash your hair. All that grease really lit up fast.”

Snotlout palmed his hair. “Don’t hate me for my looks, babe.”

Tuffnut snorted somewhere in the vicinity of Fishlegs’ elbow. “What looks?”

“It was Ruffnut’s idea,” Fishlegs said. His face was pale where his scarf showed it; his scouting run had left him shuddering nearly as regularly as Hiccup shuddered. “Have Hookfang lick Snotlout’s hair. Use his hairs for fuses. Then we set the ends on fire.”

“Boom,” said Ruffnut, flashing her hands.

“So,” said Snotlout, “like you see, I did bring the boom.”

“It was really smart,” Fishlegs said, glancing down at Ruffnut where she was smirking, pressed to his side. “I didn’t even think of using Monstrous Nightmare saliva, but it makes sense. Their spit’s highly flammable.”

“I don’t forget things that explode,” Ruffnut said by way of explanation. She socked Fishlegs in the gut, and he gasped. “Don’t think I’m some kind of _nerdy_.”

“Ha,” Tuffnut said happily, “you’re totally a nerd. Brainiac. Bet you read books.”

“Stop,” Ruffnut moaned, “I’m gonna hurl.”

“That _was_ pretty clever,” Hiccup said, and Ruffnut kicked her legs in outrage. 

“There’s nothing wrong with being smart,” Fishlegs said.

“Yes, there is!” Ruffnut wailed. “You’re smart! And you’re a loser!”

Tuffnut snickered. “Like, the biggest loser we know.”

“Stop,” Astrid warned. 

The twins withdrew, lapsing into silence. Ruffnut’s eyes lidded. Wedged between Fishlegs and Snotlout, Belch’s head and neck wound around him, only Tuffnut’s legs showed.

“Warm, though,” Ruffnut muttered, and she rubbed her head against Fishlegs’ side, like a cat settling in.

“Yeah,” said Tuffnut, muffled. “It’s nice, I guess. If you like being warm.”

Hiccup watched the fire. They all watched the fire. Perhaps Astrid watched him, but he thought not. He was too tired to move his head so he might check. The air around the fire was hazy, the smoke a sideways turning column that obscured and transformed the night. If ghosts walked the wind, what walked in smoke? He caught odd glimpses and then they had moved on, pulled to sea. His heart pounded in his temples. His stump pounded too. He patted Toothless’ paw and said hoarsely, “Gotta stay awake, buddy.”

Toothless sighed. His breath gusted against Hiccup’s leg. Meatlug keened softly and spat a hot rock into the fire, bolstering the flames.

“Do you remember when Gramps died?” Snotlout asked suddenly. He was shadowed, hunched beneath Hookfang’s chin. The fire had gone out on Hookfang but smoke wafted gently between his teeth.

“Yeah,” Hiccup said. The boulder took the brunt of the storm’s force. Regardless, the wind tugged at the fire, drawing the flames out at a long and flickering angle.

Snotlout stared at the fire. His hands hung off his knees. He worked his fingers restlessly.

“You were sick. So you weren’t there when we had to put him in the ground.”

“Yeah,” said Hiccup, worn. “I was too busy dying myself.” 

He thought he might be dying now. He thought if they didn’t get out of the blizzard soon they might all die.

“Not funny,” Astrid murmured.

Snotlout’s jaw had tensed. He went on tugging his knuckles.

“I’m sorry,” Hiccup said. 

Snotlout hitched a shoulder. It fell again. His fireproof cloak glimmered like the summer sea in the firelight.

“Me too,” he said. That was it. 

Hiccup watched the fire and tried to remember Gramps. An old man, wrinkled and clever. He’d married twice, to a frail woman who bore Valka then died, and then to Spitelout’s mother. There was blood shared between Hiccup and Snotlout. What did that mean? Less, he thought, than the history they shared. You could move forward but the past was always there, walking with you. 

“If we die,” Snotlout said, “I just wanted you to know. You’re not totally useless.”

“Thank you,” said Hiccup dryly.

Snotlout smirked reflexively. “You’re welcome.”

Astrid stirred beside Hiccup. “Do I get an apology too?”

“Are we humiliating Snotlout?” Tuffnut asked, rousing. “Can I ask for an apology too?”

“What did I ever do to you?” Snotlout shot at him.

Tuffnut shrugged his legs. “I dunno. I just wanted to be part of this bonding experience.”

“We’re freezing to death, idiot,” said Ruffnut. “How is that bonding?”

“Eh,” said Snotlout. “We’ve been through worse.”

“When?”

“The Red Death,” Fishlegs said. “That was worse, I think.”

“I always wanted to die in fire,” Tuffnut said. “So this is worse.”

“I always wanted to live forever,” said Ruffnut.

“Nobody lives forever,” Hiccup said. He ran his hand up Toothless’ leg. Toothless’ breath rustled the coat. 

Death had come in the end to Dagur. It had taken him into its arms, like a mother reclaiming her babe. Perhaps Valka waited at the crossroads for Hiccup. With her stood Gramps, and the grandmother Hiccup had never met, and Stoick’s two brothers, and Hiccup’s own brother, stillborn, and the sister who had died shortly after her birth, a year before Hiccup was born. He cast his eyes to the ground, away from the shadows in the fire, shadows that in his fevered state took on the shape of the longing, lonely dead. He had lived this before, this time in the ice with Astrid. He would live it again if he’d need; he needed. Valka had given up her life for Hiccup. The Pox had given up its life, though it had known him but the afternoon. 

What Astrid saw in the fire’s quivering heart she did not share, not with Hiccup, not with anyone. She only held him to her, her cheek against his hair, her heart beating on in her throat. A soul desperate for love found love. The Pox had watched Hiccup go. Perhaps it was that Dagur had never wanted for love. “I didn’t want to care,” Astrid had said. Her arms surrounded him. 

“If we survive,” said Astrid, “then it’ll be because we survived together.”

O, my gods, Hiccup thought in prayer. In his head he thought this prayer in his father’s voice rather than his own. His father’s deep voice carried with it dignities Hiccup’s nasal voice would never bear. As he prayed he watched her heart beating, beating. What ice made it past the boulder pattered on Toothless’ outstretched wings, on the wings of all the dragons as they raised them, stretched, to guard the fire. A long and unkind night awaited them. This was winter and it would not again leave for many months. They could only pray this storm would ease, and so he prayed. 

Fishlegs shared a legend of a dragon as big as the ocean, a dragon that ate the sun at the apex of winter, and Ruffnut laughed as he told it.

“Stupid,” she said, giggling as Fishlegs flushed. “Why would a dragon that big eat the sun? The sun’s _tiny_. It’s smaller than Tuffnut’s _brain_.”

“Yeah,” Tuffnut mumbled, “and that thing’s so tiny you can’t even see it.”

“It’s a metaphor,” Fishlegs said, “for the winter solstice. Ancient peoples would tell stories to make sense of the natural world…”

“Sto-o-op,” Ruffnut wheezed, “I’m trying to stay _awake_. You’re gonna kill me.”

Snotlout said, “I bet I could eat the sun. I’ll just fly right up there and grab it in my hands and eat it.”

When Fishlegs had finished she launched into a retelling of how Tuffnut had lost the little toe of his right foot when they were six; for years this toe alone had distinguished them from one another. Tuffnut retaliated: “Hey,” he said, “remember when you ate those poison mushrooms and you thought I was a ghost?”

“Yeah,” Ruffnut sighed wistfully. “I liked those mushrooms.”

Around the circle it went till the act of staying awake was itself so great a task they could not speak. The water chopped, out in the blackness. Beneath the waves strange beasts moved: Thunderdrums, and ancient dragons that (so said Fishlegs’ legends) hadn’t seen the light in uncounted centuries, and beady-eyed sharks, and the forgotten dead given to the sea as they walked their silent paths through the silt there in the darkest valleys of the ocean. Once, Ruffnut and Snotlout went out with Hookfang to gather more wood for the fire. They returned shivering, with Hookfang blazing weakly. Ice hissed on his scales. 

After a time the ice softened. Sleet passed to snow. The wind gentled. Night remained. The snowflakes trundled fatly on their way. Hiccup turned his face up. Toothless blocked the snow with his wings. Leaning forward, Hiccup got his gloved hand out from the shelter. Snow spattered his palm. The flakes were thick and white and fluffed, as petals on a flower. He stretched both hands out, cupping them together to catch the snow as it fell, like a blessing from Eir. 

He looked to Astrid. He offered his hands. The snow melted slowly in the wool. The delicacy of their patterns, unique to each, blurred. Her eyes were dark, her head ducked into her collar. The fur crept along her cheeks. She nodded.

“All right,” said Hiccup.

They took to the air. To stay longer in the small safety of that boulder was to risk entrapment when the blizzard worsened, as it would again. There in the archipelago winter storms lingered weeks. Soon Berk would be locked in ice. She would live, or she would starve. It was the same for everyone when the cold woke from its uneasy slumber in the north. You lived, or you did not. So then live.

The sky lightened, not much but some; enough. Toothless surged forward, skimming the white-tipped sea with his wings before climbing again. He howled against the wind, a roar that carried on and on. Then he snuffed and shook his head, his crest half-fanned and his head cocked. 

“Wait,” said Snotlout, “did anyone else hear that?”

“There,” said Astrid. She rose out of the saddle, grasping his shoulders for balance as the wind wobbled her. “Look. See? There!” She pointed to the horizon. “Stormfly! Here! Stormfly!” She cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted, “ _Stormfly!_ Good girl!” and she began to wave, laughing as she did it. 

Hiccup squinted, following her gesture, and there he saw them, his father and the rest of the rescue party, rising out of the horizon like the sun behind the clouds, and Astrid whooping as the wind carried Stormfly’s cries across the ocean. Toothless tossed his head and blasted the sky with fire, a flare to light up the sea. 

“Thank you,” Hiccup said, “thank you. Thank you. Oh, my gods,” and at last he could rest; at last, he rested. This, here, is the hook on which Stoick sets his helmet; here is the rack for ax, for sword, for hammer and shield. Lay down these things one after another and then you too may be laid down. At the end of each day did Stoick sit upon the chair at the little table they shared and he would bend to unhook his boots. Beside him was Hiccup’s chair, unbalanced where one of the legs had cracked at the foot, and there on the other side of the table, against the wall, that was Valka’s chair. Stoick stood and balanced his hand on the back of that chair and stepped out of his boots. Perhaps if Hiccup listened he might hear his father sigh then. 

Someone sighed. That was his own breath, slipping out his chest to pass whitely in the air. He blinked. Above: Toothless’ fire radiated out, a white-hot bolt that dissipated into a widening halo. The heavens expanded and shuddered at the edges. Snow spotted, like stars come to burn out against his skin. Now the halo tightened, convulsing upon itself to but one brilliant pinprick, and then that too had gone and only the dark remained. 

“Hiccup!” Astrid was shouting. She caught him as he swooned. Her hands darted along the front of the coat, feeling at his chest. “Hiccup!”

Snow, at his lips. He said, “I’m okay,” and he said, “Don’t worry,” and he said, “Hey, at least I didn’t lose a leg this time,” but he didn’t say any of those things. The breath had slipped out and it would not return. He’d lost that too. Still it continued to slip from him, pale vapor like smoke. Before we were humans we were dragons; before we were dragons we were air. 

He was a boy lying sickly in bed. His skin hurt. He was burning and he had always burned. His father got his hand beneath his head and, jostling him, raised him up to put a stone around his neck. The weight crushed his chest. His face was dirty. He’d seen that in his father’s helmet, reflected murkily in the iron.

“Dirt?” He touched the back of one finger to Hiccup’s cheek. The nail was cool. “No. Those are only your freckles. That’s where your mother kissed you.”

He said, “I remember.” There was a woman in Stoick’s shadow, a woman who hid there and would not come out. Her lips were dry as dust.

“You were a babe,” said Stoick. He stroked the hair from Hiccup’s brow. His palm rasped. “But she loved you. She did. There’s some of her in you.”

“My freckles,” said Hiccup.

His father chuckled. “Aye,” he said, “there’s those. And your jokes, those are Val.” He tweaked the end of Hiccup’s nose. “Your nose. Some of that is her. Time was Gobber would say she made you out of herself. But I had some little doing in it.”

“She loved me?” said Hiccup.

Stoick brushed his hair. He brushed it again. The laugh had gone. His brow pinched. 

“She did,” he said. “That’s why she left. To keep you safe.”

“She’ll come back.”

“No, son,” said Stoick. His great hand settled on Hiccup’s head. In that huge palm, Hiccup existed entire. “She won’t be coming back. The dead are lost to us. You’ll see her again, when your time is come.”

He watched his father’s shadow. He studied the vast darkness contained within Stoick’s shoulders, the slope of his back.

“Can I see her?”

Stoick’s shoulders bent. He laid his hand on top of the stone, set at Hiccup’s collar. His father kissed his brow, and his lips were dry and thin, held tight across his teeth. When he had done this, he cradled Hiccup to his shoulder. Stoick smelled of sweat and wood smoke, and the half-braided wilds of his beard scratched Hiccup’s sticky face.

“Not yet,” said Stoick. “You have to stay with me a while more.”

“Does she miss me?”

“She misses you.”

“Is she lonely?”

“Aye,” said his father, gruff, “she is that.”

His father’s hand at his back held him upright. Without Stoick he would have fallen to the bed again, his head too heavy to keep up on his neck.

“But I can’t see her,” Hiccup said. 

“No,” said Stoick. He eased Hiccup down, laying him gently in the sheets, though his arm still encircled Hiccup’s shoulder. “I’ll be seeing Val before you will, lad. It’ll be on me to explain it to her. It’s my head she’s wanting for keeping you so long.”

“But you’re not leaving,” said Hiccup.

Stoick said, “I’m not leaving you. I’m going to sit right here beside you till you’ve got your senses back.”

His father was the mountain that held up the sky. His father’s hand at his chest was the hand that pulled the tide from the shore then put it on the sand again.

“And you won’t go away.”

“I won’t go away.”

“Don’t go away,” said Hiccup. His eyelids sank inexorably. The weight of the talisman given unto him was such that it drew him ever downward, till his father was no more than a shadow. “You have to promise.”

“I swear it,” said the chief. “I will not leave you, lad.”

Fragments, as from a dream, or a reflection in the water, scattered by a stone tossed in the center:

“What’s happened to him?” This was Gobber, who rode a fat Gronckle alongside Stoick, so huge on Stormfly that Hiccup could have laughed; but Gobber’s brow was creased and his iron tooth showed, and he looked not fearsome but fearful. This, Gobber, the man who had taught Hiccup to wield a hammer, to tend a fire, to work metal and shape things both blunt and fine. The long ends of his braceleted mustache trailed over his shoulders.

Hiccup said, “I forgot to stoke the forge again,” thinking this was why Gobber frowned so. Why had he forgot that? He’d forgotten the why of it, too, and then he thought of Dagur.

“Never you mind the forge,” said Gobber. “The dragons will make do without new teeth for a day. It’s you we’re worried about.”

“Me?” Hiccup frowned. “It’s not like I’m dying.”

Stoick thumped his fist to his thigh. “Enough of that!” He thundered. Even the storm, it seemed to Hiccup, paused at the strength of Stoick’s voice. “What is it, then?” he demanded of Astrid.

“He was sick when we found him,” said Astrid over Hiccup’s head. She hesitated. “Just a cold, but maybe something else. I don’t know. Dagur had him, and some of Dagur’s men were sick. The storm made it worse.”

Her hands were spread across his chest. That was her heart, beating in his skull so that the whole of the world pulsed. She carried him with her in her arms, to her breast. He was sprawled against her, his knees limp where they framed Toothless’ neck. His stump itched. He tried to rise. Dagur would be back soon.

“Hiccup,” said Astrid.

“I have to get up,” he said.

She clasped him. Her gloved hand brushed his throat. A smell of blood, long dried, and wetted wool: this, from her hand. Hiccup stilled. His fingers grazed her arm, now sliding down to grip him about the belly. She hefted him up so that his head was at her shoulder. The thumping of her heart receded. The blood was not his. He had put that blood there.

“Astrid,” he said. “You—” He shifted, turning.

“Stop pushing yourself,” she snapped, in a voice thin like a string pulled taut and then plucked with the nail of a little finger. The air shivered with the highness of it.

“Listen to her, lad,” said Gobber, “I know you’ve a bull’s head but let’s not have you losing that.”

Hiccup reached to touch her face. Where were you when the ax came down? When her eyes were wide and her face was pale beneath the burn, and she would have felled Dagur? Again, the air shivered. Again, he wavered. Wavering, he collapsed. She embraced him in his falling. She caught him, as she always caught him. If she fell who would catch her? He was weak against her, frail, and he looked up from her chest to see her face, contorted with some emotion that surpassed fear. Fur cradled her jaw. Her eyes shone. Her hair, bared, like the heads of wheat before the summer harvest, long yellow stalks bending to the caprices of the wind yet unbreaking. Summer was far away and long gone and not soon to return, but here was Astrid, her hands hitched at his side and her chin tipping to her throat that she might look at him as he would look at her.

“I shouldn’t have left,” he said.

“It isn’t your fault,” said Astrid. “What—did you kidnap yourself?”

He shook his head. The world leaned; it tottered on its side. He lolled.

“Hiccup!”

“I’m sorry,” he mumbled. “I didn’t want… Stupid. Useless.”

“You’re not,” she snarled. Now had come the break, a crack in her throat. Seal it with your fingers, but his hands were thick with lead and he could not lift them.

“You aren’t stupid,” she said. “Or useless.”

“Scared,” he said. 

He had driven the pry bar into Dagur’s throat till the forked ends bit bone and he could drive it no further. For Astrid, he thought; or for the Pox, yoked to the wall with a collar that choked it and manacles that would break the long bones in its legs. As his vision, spotted black, had dilated, he had seen Astrid, limned in summer and in winter, and he had seen Dagur whose teeth showed in a grin like that of a skull. The water closed over his head. His breath, a trail of bubbles. Who will pull you out from the water?

She curled over him. Her breath, warm vapor drawn across his cheeks. He blinked up at her. Her eyes were so very blue. Her gaze turned inward. She looked not at him but perhaps at the freckle, a large one, that sat at the apex of his cheekbone, beneath the corner of his eye.

“Why do you think you’re the only one who was afraid?” she asked.

He blinked again. His eyelashes glittered. Astrid glittered.

“You were afraid?”

Her hands, tucked beneath his arm, tightened at his side. The knob of her thumb dug between his ribs.

“If we were just a minute later,” she said. She stopped. Her blue lips went white, clasped between her teeth. She pressed her face to his head, and he felt the shape of her nose through Ruffnut’s, or Tuffnut’s, hat. 

How pale she’d been when she dragged the ax out of Dagur’s back, how slack her jaw and how tight her cheeks. She’d stared wild-eyed at Hiccup as Dagur gasped and his blood, ripped from him, ran up her face. 

Hiccup began laboriously to sit up and halfway done he froze, for the world had set to leaning again; it reversed itself twice, one way and then the other, so that he was damp and shivering and certain to vomit. Beneath them, Toothless jerked. He wobbled in his course. Astrid swore and lunged forward, to get her foot more squarely in the stirrup. Hiccup swayed. Now he reversed.

“Give him here,” said Stoick.

Before we were air we were sunlight. Astrid’s hair shone gold, and showed matted, and she’d blood on her jaw from the killing and his name in her mouth. Hiccup clutched her hand and then he passed from the back of Toothless to his father’s arms. No ghosts walked watchfully through the snow; only the wind. He jerked, and wildly he looked about him, for he had heard something on the wind, or he had felt it in the snow drops that dashed out their white lives on his freckled and burning flesh. Like a mother kissing her babe.

“Easy, Hiccup,” commanded his chief, but this was his father’s hand that engulfed his chest. This was his father’s breath that billowed. His father said, “Stop fighting it. We’re taking you home. You just stay with me now.”

Stormfly squawked. She gleamed, bluer than the winter-darked waters racing below, brighter than the sky, where the storm drew breath. 

Toothless called to him: a mournful cry, given harsh corners as he dragged it out his chest. 

Hiccup said, “I’m all right, buddy,” and the words were empty in his mouth. He had promised the Pox a new name. Fat snow flakes scattered to and fro. They dashed against the wood boards flooring the hold and there gathered, sticking to the wood of the last few steps so that when Astrid landed, ice splintered beneath her heel.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

His father’s arm engulfed him. 

“Keep it for your mother. You aren’t going to her yet.”

To breathe hurt. He closed his eyes and did breathe anyway. He was falling out of the sky, rushing to the water. Dagur laughed over him. Then Astrid knelt to look at him where he laid in the snow. So. What are you going to do about it?

“Astrid,” he said.

“I’m right here,” she said.

He said, “You came.”

“Of course I came,” said Astrid. She had reclaimed some equilibrium. Toothless flew steadily. She spoke without wavering. “Did you want us to leave you there?” A deepness thrummed in her.

If she hadn’t come, he thought. Would he have stabbed Dagur even had he not seen her standing in the doorway? Out of Dagur, hate glowed like the embers of a long burning fire, once stoked and then left to dwindle till it had died entirely. The Pox moaned on the floor and Hiccup stepped over Dagur’s motionless legs to cup the dragon’s snout. There is hate in the hearts of all persons, and there are some who cannot be saved and there are those who will not, and he did not know what it meant that he had felt only anger when he smashed the pry bar into the fragile junction of Dagur’s collar and yet he could not bear to witness when Astrid delivered a mercy to the Pox that Hiccup could not.

He pressed his face to his father’s breast. His father’s beard bristled; like brambles, it scored the skin. Hiccup wore no talisman but here, his father’s hand, like the comfort of a pan of hot coals under blankets in winter. Here, the place on his cheek where Astrid’s breath had warmed him, and once a long time ago she had kissed him and her lips were thin and her eyelashes pricked his skin and his arm had throbbed where she’d struck him under the moonlight in the cove, while Toothless hummed and cocked his head and watched with curious eyes as Hiccup relearned how to breathe. Once, even longer ago, his mother had left spots on his skin, and she had loved him. You are not a burden. The stone around your neck is a message to the gods, and it is given to you by someone who loves you. 

Before we were sunlight—

“Toothless,” Hiccup said. He scratched as he said it, and so he said the name again. He held his hand out. Yellow flowers ringed his wrist. They spoke to him in his fever of spring, and the sweetness of melting snow, and the smell of the earth as it thawed and woke again.

He had been a boy once, not a boy who laid in the snow or a boy who fought for air as he slowly drowned, but a boy who took a knife and cut through the ropes with which he had struck down a dragon. 

Astrid led Toothless to him, and as Stormfly banked, turning to her side so that her wings would not dash against Toothless’ wings, Toothless gazed at Hiccup through the flurries, dancing coldly with the promise of winter but the promise, too, of spring inevitably come. Toothless had green eyes, and they were vast, and they were strange, and in the deep blackness of his pupils Hiccup saw himself reflected, a wan, small thing; in the deeper blackness of Toothless’ scaled brow he saw a vague shadow of his father, a gleaming effigy of Astrid, leaning over. Then Toothless turned his head and set the very end of his nose, blunt, in the curve of Hiccup’s palm. He chuffed and drew breath. Softly he exhaled another short, hot spurt of dry air across Hiccup’s wrist.

They were necessitated to separate. Stormfly grumbled at her load and balanced again. Stoick splayed his fingers over Hiccup’s chest, bearing him back to his own. 

“Steady, girl,” Astrid was calling. “Good girl. We’re going to play so many games when we get home. Anything you want to play.”

Stormfly sang, and Astrid—worn—laughed, husky and wondrous to Hiccup’s reckoning. Winter blanketed the sea, snow melting on the water, fine fractal flakes dissolving to nothing. In the distance he heard the twins, grousing like two heads on a dragon, neither in agreement with the other. This was as it had ever been. The fever had swallowed Hiccup entire. By day no ghosts walked the snow, no matter how thick the clouds and far the sun. Gobber rounded up the other teens; he marshaled the rest of the party to draw them all close. Stoick held Hiccup firm.

His father said, “Spare him,” in another place, in another time; and the Pox gave up its throat.

In the consumptive heat of his sickness as they traveled through the cold and unlit day Hiccup heard Toothless’ throaty calls. In that delirium he heard words in those wordless grumbles. Toothless said, “Rest. Rest. I’m here,” and they were all of them here, come to carry Hiccup from the water where he sank. You are not a burden because you are loved. Because you are loved, you are not a burden. Sightlessly he watched the clouds going by. Little flakes of snow kissed him wetly on his cheeks, his nose, the lids of his eyes, his mouth. You will survive this, too. 

Before we were sunlight we were babes, helpless and small, and our mothers held us to their hearts and kissed us so we freckled and said, “Oh, look at you. Wee thing. How did you come here?” but he could not remember if she had done this, even as the first true fever dream crept upon him. In it he pushed Dagur into the water and Dagur said, “My brother,” but the words were lost to the waves, and blood spilled like red ink through the water from his ragged neck, and Hiccup said, “I’m sorry.” Astrid put her hands over his eyes. She said, “Go,” and he turned, as she commanded, to find Toothless. Astrid knelt by the river with her ax stained red and her chin low, head ducked, and her hair like wheat stirring. In the dream, he knelt beside her. He put his arm around her unbending shoulders. She said again, “Go,” and he said, “No.”

*

The reprieve proved fleeting. Winter would not be denied its grand entrance, now that it had got its toe in the door. Stoick shed his enormous fur cloak and wrapped it about himself and Hiccup, so that Hiccup was safely cocooned. The dark green yarn of the hat peeked out, two stubby red spikes knitted on top, and that was it. Like he would a babe, Stoick cradled his son.

“That’s all of ‘em,” Gobber said. “Though Tuffnut swears half of him has frozen.”

“Good,” said Stoick grimly. 

“Oh, yes,” said Gobber, “with any luck we’ll be able to thaw Ruffnut out when we get back to the island.”

Stoick glanced heavenward before he turned on Astrid. “What were you thinking? You should have fetched us before flying off into a storm like that.”

“With all due respect, sir,” she said, striving for a properly deferential tone, no hard task before a chief such as Stoick, “with the storm already coming I figured it would be better to send Stormfly to you while we went in advance.”

“Flying into a storm,” said Stoick, “putting your selves, and your dragons, at risk, with no certainty we would find you—”

Nearly gently, Gobber said, “They’ve done it before, Stoick. They aren’t so young as you think.”

“Then they’re old enough to know better than to rush off without a second thought.”

“Aye, and you’ve never done that.”

“If we hadn’t left when we did,” said Astrid, “Hiccup might have died.” 

Stoick looked down to his chest, to the short spikes of the hat and the boy beneath. His broad arm shifted, more thoroughly encompassing the breadth of Hiccup, curled to his breast. Perhaps he too imagined Hiccup, lost, but he would not see how Hiccup’s face had contorted as Dagur strangled him. Toothless whined anxiously and Astrid petted his neck, trying to soothe what would not be calmed.

“You said it was Dagur.”

“Yes,” she said. She scratched at Toothless’ scales and he whuffed. Though they flew now at a safe distance from Stormfly, so that their wings would not tangle, he continued to turn his head, looking to and smelling for Hiccup.

“And you didn’t capture the madman?” asked Gobber. 

She folded her hands together on the saddle horn. Steadfastly she watched the horizon, grey and indistinct with the snowfall. Toothless glanced at her.

“He’s dead,” she said.

“Wait,” said Fishlegs, “you mean—dead dead?”

“You’re sure of this,” said Stoick. 

Astrid met her chief’s eyes. She forced stillness to her hands, so that she would not squeeze the horn. He saw much. The chief was not her father but she knew some of the pressure Hiccup bore. The weight of Stoick’s regard could crush.

“I made sure of it,” she said.

He looked searchingly at her. His eyes were narrow, between his heavy brow and his thick beard. A fine frost had roosted in his mustache.

“Okay,” said Snotlout. He twisted around in the saddle to squint at Astrid. “Hold on. You mean you killed Dagur?”

“She’s hogging all the exciting stuff again,” said Tuffnut, slouching. “All we got to do was blow stuff up.”

“He was strangling Hiccup,” Astrid snapped. That silenced them. Still, she glared at Snotlout and at the twins, and Fishlegs too though he looked as if he were still working through it. “I didn’t have any other choice. He would have killed Hiccup. If we were just a minute later—” Her teeth clicked. She gripped the horn.

Stormfly trilled softly at Astrid, and her eye, turned to Astrid, was yellow and unwavering as she waited. Steady. Astrid breathed through her nose. Cold air, sharp in her throat. Sharper in Hiccup’s throat, she thought, with the bruising to line it. Her gut coiled. Deliberately she let go of the horn and set her hands flat instead on either side of Toothless’ neck. He twitched his fins, the two largest rising then falling like waves while the others trembled. He echoed Stormfly’s call and then snorted at the end of it. The Gronckle Gobber rode snuffled, curiosity rousing her.

Her chief shifted on Stormfly’s back. Still bare, Astrid realized. She hadn’t time to put a saddle on Stormfly that morning, and Stoick had not dressed her for the flight. The spines at her back were small and flexible, in contrast to the thicker keratin spikes that laced her tail. Like sitting on rocks rather than burning coals; a small comfort.

Stoick inclined his head, just so. He held Hiccup to his chest as a mother would her babe, with quiet tenderness. “You did well,” he said gruffly. 

“Aye,” said Gobber. “You did that.”

There was a thing in her throat and she swallowed that. Whatever it was it went. The twins had drawn near to her and Barf crossed over Belch’s throat so that Ruffnut could speak.

“You didn’t tell us you killed him.”

“It wasn’t important,” Astrid said cuttingly.

The twins were not easily cut, either of them. Ruffnut frowned.

“That’s definitely important,” Tuffnut said. “Are we at war with the Berserkers?”

“He isn’t _with_ the Berserkers, dummy,” Ruffnut said.

“Wasn’t,” Astrid said. The twins exchanged looks. She went on: “Anyway, he isn’t their chief.” Her jaw hurt. “Wasn’t. His sister’s their chief now.”

“Yeah,” said Tuffnut slowly, “and she’s his _sister_.”

“If anyone’s killing Tuffnut, it’s me,” Ruffnut said, jabbing her thumb not to her chest but to Tuffnut’s.

Tuffnut punched her shoulder, but he did so almost kindly. “Thanks, sis.”

She knocked him on the back of his head. “No problem.”

“Any time you want to do it, just let me know. I gotta clear out my schedule first.”

“What schedule?”

“All my hot dates?”

“Are you burning Nobber’s barn down without me?” asked Ruffnut dangerously.

“I can’t spend every minute of every day with you,” Tuffnut huffed, “ _needy_.”

“You’re needy!”

Astrid hunched closer to Toothless. At times the twins amused. She’d suspected them of playing the clown to defuse tension before, out of some strange half-realized need, of all things, to maintain a sort of peace. Hiccup, who had borne the worst of the twins, said it was only that they wanted to be the center of attention. Perhaps they simply were clowns, and it was useless to ascribe motivation to the timing of their arguments. Whatever the cause, with the wind in her face and the snow fast turning to sleet again, and Berk as yet somewhere behind the swelling horizon, she had little interest in their prattle. 

Hiccup was just a lump under his father’s cloak. Stormfly, unaccustomed to such a weight as Stoick, had fallen a bit behind, between Toothless and Meatlug. Astrid had to look back over her shoulder to see them, and the whiteness of the storm flashed, obscuring. Stoick was bent over his son. His beard had fallen like another cloak over the exposed top of Hiccup’s head. Ice lined Stoick’s helmet. Let me carry him, Astrid almost said; but she bit her lip and turned to face forward again, even as Toothless, turning to look back as she’d looked back, keened. She said, “I know,” and Toothless slumped his shoulders. He too faced the horizon.

“If anyone’s needy here, it’s you—”

“Ha!” said Ruffnut. She feigned poking his eyes with two fingers. “Remember when I went to Grammy Gruffnut’s for special lessons and you totally cried and you were all ‘oh, Ruffnut, don’t go, because I’m a giant baby, boo hoo’—”

“Haha, hey, yeah,” said Tuffnut, “I’d definitely remember that if it had ever happened, but it didn’t—”

“Last _week_!”

“Was that before or after your room mysteriously exploded?”

“I know you did it,” she snarled, “you smelled the whole place up with your B.O.—”

“That’s just your smell, that’s how you smell every day—”

Toothless gnarred, an irritated grumble that started in his chest and stuck there. The vibration of it rattled Astrid’s knees.

“Only because I’m stuck with you—”

“Do you want to just get this over with now?” Tuffnut demanded. “No holds barred. Loser has to swim back to Berk.”

Ruffnut leaned. “Naked.”

“You first.”

Again, they’d frayed. Ruffnut grabbed at her coat, and Astrid straightened to tell them to stop, but Gobber beat her to it. He slapped both Tuffnut and Ruffnut upside the head, Tuffnut with his flesh hand, Ruffnut with the wood prosthetic; they yowled, Tuffnut like a cat dunked in a tub of water and Ruffnut with rage.

“That’s enough of that,” Gobber said. “There will be plenty of time to murder each other when we’re home. But as we still have three hours of flying ahead of us, I suggest you stow it, or go ahead and jump in the water and freeze to death. I’ll leave it to your clearly superior reasoning to make that call. But while you’re working through that, _shut it_.”

He left the twins to it as he fell back to Stoick. Astrid glared at them, that they’d understand they were without allies in this, and then she looked again to her chief and to his son. 

“I think he burst my brain,” Ruffnut muttered.

“You don’t have a brain,” Tuffnut snipped, but they lapsed into a sulking silence.

“Let me hold the lad,” Gobber was saying to Stoick. 

Astrid strained to hear. The wind pulled their voices away from her, and she had to study their mouths. Stoick’s beard masked his, but the shaking of his head; that was a certain thing, easy to translate.

“Stormfly’s not used to carrying so much weight,” Gobber argued. “You cannot carry him all the way to Berk on her back. I’ll carry him a ways and then you can bear him the rest of it.”

Stoick spoke. She heard only “my son.”

“Aye,” said Gobber, “and you wouldn’t want him tipping into the ocean now would you?”

Stormfly would never, Astrid wanted to shout. She held her peace. Stormfly bobbed some, pulling to the left as she corrected for Stoick and for Hiccup. She’d such fine control, an innate equilibrium that she, with Astrid, had honed to precision; so precise an edge that Astrid could stand up in the saddle or walk upon her back, or do handsprings even now that Astrid had gained some inches in height and Stormfly had not. Even Hiccup and Toothless could not manage this.

The wind battered at Stormfly’s wings. So laden, she bobbed briefly, her left wing dipping lower than the right and the rest of her following. Stoick adjusted, perhaps without thought. Most dragons flew thusly. To the rest of the party this would seem usual, beneath notice. Astrid slung her arm down Toothless’ side and stuck her hand out. Quietly she flashed Stormfly two signals: her hand laid out flat in the air, for _steady_ ; a sudden, clenched fist that relaxed to loosely curled fingers, _no need to worry_. The first of these signals, a command, Stormfly recognized. At the second, she twisted her head and blinked one-two-three at Astrid. These more abstract messages she struggled with yet. At times, when she was rested and fed and alert, she seemed to understand intuitively what Astrid meant; at others, she stared blankly.

Again, Astrid signaled Stormfly: don’t worry. She tried smiling. Don’t worry; I’m here. 

Stormfly chirped. The smile, she’d recognized too. She cocked her head again, to consider Astrid with her other, and she chirped again. Her crest fanned. The spikes framed her face. She worried, still, and no furtive signals would put her at ease. Gobber’s borrowed Gronckle might have lost its interest in the goings on, but Stormfly, when her attention was sparked, did not readily surrender. She peered at Astrid on Toothless and then twisted her head about to glance at Gobber, who had brought the Gronckle near to collect Hiccup.

Stoick, on meeting them, had taken charge; as chief, it was his duty. He was handing Hiccup to Gobber, who took the boy, long, dangling limbs and Stoick’s furred cloak and all, and got him hitched to his arm in a business-like fashion. This was no longer her duty either. She ought to be relieved. The night had been long, the flight longer. A memory of how her old dog had cried to see her when she found him in the field, his back broken, kept creeping in to her thoughts. Once, as they’d sat about the fire, Hiccup starting fitfully out of a doze when she did nudge him, she had seen not the dog but Dagur in the tall grass. His neck, collared, had turned up to her.

Toothless hopped his back, startling Astrid. She’d begun unknowing to wander, led by her marching thoughts to a place of sleeping. She blinked furiously to clear her eyes. 

“I’m all right,” she said.

He did not believe her. His shoulder rolled. Again, his breath burst noisily out his nose, a steaming white cloud that dashed into her face. The warmth of it pricked her cheeks.

“There’s not a lot we can do until we get back to Berk.”

This answer satisfied him no more than it satisfied Astrid. There wasn’t much satisfaction to be had at sea in this hour, as the wind picked up and the snow bowed out entirely to make way for ice. A day: she’d been awake a full day. They all had. The monotony of the sky and sea, mirrored grey, beguiled. A day without food; a day without sleep. They’d melted snow around the fire, to drink as water. If she thought of it, her bladder pinched. All these the usual inconveniences of the body. 

If she rode Stormfly, she could curl with her knees pulled up tight along Stormfly’s side and hide her face behind Stormfly’s crest and be warm. Hookfang could light his scales, licked fastidiously clean each day and so coated with the oily, flammable saliva all Nightmares possessed, but Stormfly just ran hot; a consequence of the intensity of her sparkling flame. Astrid sat cozy on Stormfly through the worst of the winter chores, clearing fallen trees, or checking the mountains for the signs of avalanche or working to redirect an avalanche away from the village and toward the cliffs west of it. If her hands chilled in her gloves, she only had to rub her palms along the back of Stormfly’s neck. 

Fever had racked Hiccup. Under Snotlout’s thick coat he had sweltered. Little of that ill heat had come through, too sharp the wind. She’d wrapped her arms about his belly, her face on his back or her chin at his shoulder. What warmth she had in her she offered. His every shiver had carried. The coat had muted the bony edges of his shoulder blades. She’d put her hands over his heart, to feel it beating. The coat had muted that as well, but she had imagined that steady thumping in his breast. She had imagined that as she held him she was warm.

Exhaustion was set into her bones. Once she had recognized it she could no longer deny it. She had named the dog, though her mother warned her not to. The superstition was true; to name a thing gave it power. What had she named the dog? Astrid’s grandfather had named her: beauty of the gods. The shape of it meant nothing to her. Perhaps a name only had power to those who spoke it. Hiccup had used to stutter when he called her name.

She said, “Hiccup,” very quietly. Her pale breath shivered over her shoulder and she turned to follow it. Gobber had Hiccup, rested in his arms, Stoick’s cloak thrown over Hiccup as a blanket. She could see the contour of his cheek, just visible over the blanket’s edge. Her heart stuck. 

Old Boy. She had called the dog Old Boy. Her father had laughed when she’d told him this. In all her recollections of him her father was laughing. A short man with steady hands, he had made his living working with wood rather than slaying dragons. The most blood he could stomach was the blood that followed a splinter, he liked to say, but he had stitched Hekja’s wounds for her and tended to her bruises and her breaks, and he had done all this calmly with his steady hands. Astrid had told her father she’d named the dog, so he would support her when Hekja scowled.

“You’re worried for nothing,” he’d told her mother; but a name was a name, and Astrid had cried after all, standing there on the ridge watching as her mother brought the ax down to sever Old Boy’s throat. That was the year before her father had died. She hadn’t cried then. Even as the smoke from the pyre blew to shore, and grit got in her eyes, she wouldn’t cry. She hadn’t allowed it. That night she’d curled on her side in her bed and listened as her mother lay awake, Hekja’s breath uneven, never weeping. The healers would have to clean her cuts for her. This was the closest Astrid had come to crying, till the Red Death. Till she had thought Hiccup dead in that fire, a pyre so tremendous it might have honored the Allfather; instead it honored Hiccup. Hiccup. 

His name sat on her tongue. She held it there. Pressing her tongue to the roof of her mouth, she held it. Something yawned inside her. She had felt this before. The hugeness of it shook her. She was unafraid of it; but she did not name it. Still it sat in her chest, as his name sat in her mouth. She would have cried for the dog even if she hadn’t called him anything at all. Stay awake, she thought. A weird loneliness had passed over her. A feeling of uselessness. Irrational and silly. She dismissed it, but the loneliness lingered, and the yawning in her breast, that sensation of standing on a precipice and looking down. At the bottom of it was nothing she could see. She only knew it was there, and it was waiting, and a fall was coming.

They flew on through the bitter, early hours of morning. At last Berk resolved out of the grey horizon. As they came nearer to it the watch-giants emerged distinct, their mouths flickering with fire as they would throughout the winter, Vikings making the long trek by foot across the bay, once the waters had iced on top, or the shorter one by dragon, to keep the fires going. Through snow; through sleet; hail and rain colder even than ice. Berk had lit the winter’s torches. 

So, they were home. For the last length Stoick had exerted his right as father to bear Hiccup.

“Don’t blame me when you tip the both of you in Odin’s bath,” said Gobber.

Astrid had shouted, “Stormfly can carry you the rest of the way.”

Gobber had shrugged. He’d given his warning, and gently he gave Hiccup to the boy’s father.

With some delicacy, strange in so great a man as the chief, Stoick tucked Hiccup’s head to the crook of his shoulder and set to swaddling him in that cloak. Astrid gave her chief his privacy. Her own chest was pained with cold, though she laid flat as she might on Toothless’ back. The saddle damped his heat, as a saddle would not have damped Stormfly’s. Her arms were empty. She had no claim. 

Home. The blizzard granted no hopeful peek at the sun. There was no glory to this homecoming, only home. A longship was docking, and the people aboard it worked quickly to unload its cargo of fish, tying laden nets to the feet of a specially trained flock of Nadders who would carry the fish to the smokehouses, where the meat would be cured to bolster winter stores. The storm obscured much of this till they were nearly upon the dock. Spitelout oversaw the work, and it was Spitelout Astrid addressed. She rose in the saddle and waved to him. He saw only a shadow in the snow, she thought, till Toothless spat fire, and two men on the dock swore and fell flat on the wood. Spitelout startled.

“Call for Gothi,” she shouted. “She’s needed at the chief’s house.”

Affronted, Snotlout said, “You can’t tell my dad what to do.”

“Eh, she’s right,” said Gobber. “And if it makes her feel better, having something to do, then…”

Astrid urged Toothless on. 

Stormfly landed outside the chief’s house, heavy on her left leg. She tottered a half-step and then righted, and she dropped to her knees. She hadn’t needed to, as Stoick had gathered his son in his arms and stepped down as she was just crouching, but she was in this as most things particular about doing it correctly. On her knees, Stormfly groaned and shook her head, slinging ice off her crest. Her wings fluttered.

Astrid made to hop off Toothless. She meant to hurry ahead of him and open the door for Stoick, but she too staggered. Too long in the saddle she’d gone stiff, and her legs crumpled beneath her. She would have collapsed had Toothless not caught her on his snout. He bumped her up to her feet and pressed to her side, as she had seen him do with Hiccup. Stormfly struggled to her feet, calling to Astrid.

Gobber got the door. 

As long as the night, as long as their flight, the few short minutes waiting for Gothi were longest of all. Stoick dumped Hiccup in the chief’s own bed. Toothless squeezed into the house behind Astrid, and he got the fire going with a little concussive pop. She came to the foot of the bed and stood there, looking at Hiccup and how small he was in his father’s huge bed, how frail. Stoick bent to unbuckle the prosthetic leg. The cuff loosened; he pulled it off. The trousers, the left leg sewn shut so that it covered his stump, were next. Astrid glanced away. The other teens were crowding into the house. They were all as wind-chapped as Hiccup, and the twins were leaning together. 

The skin under the cuff had blistered and then broken, from the damp. Then the freeze set in. It was the fever she’d worried over, the plague of Dagur’s men. 

“Get out of the way,” Gobber said, and he jostled the teenagers so they scattered, clearing the door. 

Gothi, swaddled thoroughly in a coat and several thickly knitted scarves, all a different color, stomped over the threshold. She’d no staff, and so she latched on to Gobber’s arm. Her gaggle of Terrible Terrors poured in behind her, shivering and moaning from the cold. She snapped her fingers at them. Then she snapped at the teenagers. Her gaze was sharp, though half-hid by the scarf slouching down her brow.

“Go home, the lot of you,” Gobber translated. “Get some rest, before Gothi needs to see to you too.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Astrid said.

Stoick looked up from the bed. He’d taken off his helmet. His hand covered his son’s. Toothless had taken to the rafters, and he called softly to Hiccup, drowsing.

“You’re going home,” the chief said. “All of you.”

Who was Astrid to contradict her chief? She opened her mouth.

“Is he going to be okay?” Fishlegs asked.

Gobber deposited Gothi by the bed. She began unwinding her scarves, and he held his arm out again as a clothes rack. “Oh, I’m sure he’ll be all right.” A faded red scarf, then a green striped one. “He’s a rare talent for survival that some of you would be wise to cultivate. Snotlout.”

“Hey!” said Snotlout, and Ruffnut sniggered.

Astrid stepped forward. Her knuckles twinged as she clutched the foot board. Stoick looked at her. The weight of his gaze always struck her, as if he were one of the great kings of old. He’d pouches under his eyes and wrinkles at the corners. He always had them.

“You too Astrid,” Stoick said. 

She said, “Please.”

“You’ve done enough,” her chief said. “Go home. Rest.”

Gothi slapped the last scarf over Gobber’s wrist and then reached for Hiccup’s hand, the one Stoick did not hold clasped between his palms. She flicked her fingers at Astrid.

Astrid took a step back. She took another. She could not look away from Hiccup’s chest. The breath swelled weakly in him; it rattled away. His stump was spotted. Frostbite, she thought. Then Gobber set his right hand between her shoulders and guided her to the door.

“Your parents will be waiting for you,” he said. “See to your dragons before you collapse into bed, though, aye?”

Stormfly had folded her wings over her head. At the sound of Gobber’s voice, she parted her wings. Her head came up. She trilled at Astrid. At the threshold, Astrid turned. The fire cast the room in a yellow light. Toothless was perched in the rafter over the bed, his tail hanging so that as he swung it, the tip of his two fins, dragon leather and sturdy canvas, brushed Hiccup’s legs. 

Stoick said, “Thank you, Astrid.”

She went back into the cold. Gobber closed the door against the wind. Stormfly trilled again.

“So,” Ruffnut said, “what do we do now?”

“We really should look after our dragons,” Fishlegs said, glancing from Ruffnut to Astrid. “My poor baby’s about to go to sleep on her feet.”

She was looking out to sea, from the vantage point of the stoop, set over the village. The horizon was gone, swallowed by the blizzard. The roots of her teeth were shivering.

“I wasn’t talking to you, smartie. I was talking to Astrid.”

“Yeah,” said Snotlout, “he’ll be fine. Hiccup’s just a drama queen. He did it when we were kids too.”

“I wasn’t talking to you either,” Ruffnut snapped.

Astrid clomped down the steps. Shaking the ice off, Stormfly stood and leaned over Astrid. She rubbed her chin against the top of Astrid’s head. A sweet thrum had started in Stormfly’s throat, and the heat of her scales was such that for a moment Astrid thought only of how badly she wanted to lie down and sleep right there, curled against Stormfly’s chest and beneath her wing.

“Go home,” Astrid said. “Sleep. We’ve all been awake for too long.”

What more could they do? They parted, each of them to their own homes. Fishlegs and Meatlug walked, and the twins rode Barf and Belch to their clan hall, where all the branches of the Thorston family dwelled. Snotlout took Hookfang to see his father. Then Astrid too went home. 

Her mother was there. She was patching a leak in the roof on the inside, and when Astrid said tiredly, “I’m home,” her mother said, “Astrid!” and slid down the ladder. Her boots thumped heavily on the floor. Hekja was a large woman; she had dwarfed Astrid’s father. She dwarfed Astrid now as she embraced her. The hug was brief. Her mother grasped her by the shoulders and leaned back to consider Astrid. Hekja’s lip tended to pull up at the right corner, where a childhood scar left it twisted. A difference between this and a smile. She searched Astrid’s face.

“You look bone-worn.”

Astrid touched her gloved hands to her mother’s wrists. Everything she had fought crashed on her. She breathed shakily and said, “Sorry I was late.”

Hekja squeezed Astrid’s shoulders. “Get out of those clothes,” she said only. “I’ll bring you some soup. Will hot do?”

Yes, she meant to say. Her throat was too thick. Astrid nodded. 

“Hot, then,” said Hekja. 

She let go of Astrid’s shoulders and then she did something odd. She brushed her hand over Astrid’s hair. Astrid blinked.

“Get,” said her mother briskly. “Leave those clothes out. Dress warm. You,” she said to Stormfly, who’d shouldered through the door with some difficulty, “stay there. I’ll not have you getting ice on the steps.”

Stormfly called plaintively after Astrid. Stay, Astrid gestured, and even a dragon would not challenge Astrid’s mother. At the top of the stairs, her Terror, Fastfoot, stretched and chirred at her, both hello and where have you been? He flitted up to perch on her head, and his bony tail dangled beside her nose. She scratched at the underside of it.

Astrid shed her clothes in the dark of her room. Fastfoot complained at having to wait for her to finish this to cuddle again, and resentfully he clawed at her pillow, already much abused. She pulled on a heavy sweater and then, her legs still bare, she’d climbed into bed. Fastfoot left off shredding her bedding to coil on her chest. The whole of her was trembling. She was cold, so awfully cold. The heart in her chest was like ice. She curled beneath the blankets. Some warmth, there, as Fastfoot called softly to her and licked her cold chin, his tongue hot, pebbled. A bad habit, one she wasn’t to encourage; she let him groom her.

Hekja woke her. She hadn’t heard her mother’s heavy tread on the steps. She hadn’t heard Stormfly, either, but when Hekja rubbed Astrid’s shoulder and bid her to sit up, Astrid found that Stormfly was curled up on the floor and snoring in her whistling way. Fastfoot was a lump at the foot of the bed, burrowed into the blankets. 

“Eat some,” said her mother. She gave Astrid the deep bowl and a spoon to eat the soup with. Bleary through and through, Astrid obeyed. The soup burned her mouth; it scalded her throat. She gulped and ate more. 

“I’ve warmed coals in a pan for you,” said Hekja. She hitched her chin to the lidded pan, set on the cover. “Put it under the sheets for your feet.”

Astrid nodded. Her mother had more skill at cooking than Astrid, but little finesse. The chopped vegetables in the soup hadn’t cooked all the way, and she was obligated to chew them. Though Hekja had instructed her, her mother took the pan and tucked it under the sheets. Fastfoot snapped at her and Hekja said, “You!” and then Fastfoot decided he’d much rather wrap himself around the curve of the pan than scold Hekja for disturbing his nap.

Hekja did this often, telling someone what to do and then doing it immediately for them. Long ago Astrid’s father had used to tease Hekja for this. She had no faith in others. Stoutly Hekja had said, “I know to do it right.”

Astrid ate half the soup and then she could eat no more. Her chest was pleasantly over-hot; she felt as if she’d swallowed the coals. Hekja took the spoon and set it crossways over the bowl, so that it rested over it and wouldn’t slide in.

“What time is it?”

“You’ve only slept an hour,” Hekja told her. She shooed Astrid into bed again. A pile of quilts sat before the door, propping it open. Hekja gathered them and began spreading them flat on top of Astrid.

Astrid swallowed. Her tongue was numbed on top from the heat of the soup.

“Have you heard anything?”

Hekja bent across Astrid, to tuck the far side of the quilts beneath her. “Too soon to tell,” she said.

She had known this would be so. Astrid stared at the ceiling, well-patched over the years, through one leak after another. In the spring they would find new holes in the roof, spots in the wood where the ice had contracted and splintered. Stormfly twittered in her sleep. Good girl, Astrid thought. Her mother had locked the shutters in place and drawn the drape on its rack across the window. She’d put a candle on Astrid’s bedside table. The wind rattled the shutters. The candle flickered. Her mother got the quilts tucked on both sides. Her hands were sturdy, and they lingered a moment on either side of Astrid’s chest. Then she straightened.

“You did good, my girl,” said Hekja. 

Astrid said, “Mom?”

Hekja paused. She’d her hand on the door frame.

Astrid turned her face away.

“What is it?”

“Nothing,” Astrid said. She pushed her cold feet against the clothed pan, and Fastfoot nipped her heel then graciously decided to allow her to share his precious love. Delicious heat radiated into her toes through her socks. “Leave the soup.”

Her mother was quiet a time. Strike true, she’d taught Astrid. Be quick about it. Astrid watched Stormfly’s shadow, rising as she breathed in. Old Boy had yelped when Hekja swung the ax. He’d scrabbled with the two legs that still worked. He’d wanted, at the last, to live.

“When you’re ready to say,” Hekja said. “I’ll listen. You just sleep now. I’ll be helping them bring the boats up to shore.”

The candle, she left. Astrid burrowed into the covers. Stormfly’s shadow danced softly. Perhaps some of the warmth in the room was her, just Stormfly there beside Astrid, when she would usually sleep with the flock. Astrid slept. She had no dreams. No nightmares, no visions. Through much of the day she carried on like that, rousing once to piss in the chamber pot and again later to drink more of the soup, cooled. Stormfly began grunting and then stirring, and in the mid afternoon, as the sun would be setting behind the horizon, beyond the expanse of the gale, Stormfly would sleep no more. 

Setting her head on the bed, Stormfly chirruped and then chirruped again, till Astrid came around. She had dreamed after all, though her quiet fear that she would see Dagur, or perhaps Hiccup sprawled out across the floor, went unrealized. She’d dreamed instead of summer on the mountain and climbing a tree while Old Boy whined at her to come down again. Then Stormfly woke her. Stormfly blinked her eye at Astrid and tweeted. She rubbed her fat cheek on the quilts, wrinkling them. Astrid had kicked the edges out as she’d slept. One of the quilts had fallen half off the bed. This one Stormfly grasped carefully in her beak and then shook wildly. 

“You want to go out?” Astrid asked sleepily. 

Stormfly tugged another quilt off the bed and dropped it. She squawked and rocked her shoulders, swaying to either side as she fluffed her wings up. Yawning, Astrid rubbed her dry eyes with her wrist. She’d slept deeply but poorly, and the dregs of exhaustion stewed in her. Her mouth was dry, too. She folded the blankets on top of Fastfoot, who snored happily around the pan, still lingeringly warm, and not once looked up to see her go. His was a simple life. Astrid kissed the blankets where she thought his nose ought to be, somewhere under all that. In his sleep he purred.

Dressing for the cold, in her old coat rather than the new one, laid out on the rack by the fire to dry, she took a moment to write her mother a note. Stormfly butted her eagerly, jogging Astrid so the charcoal skipped across the parchment, and Astrid flicked Stormfly’s nose. Shrinking back, Stormfly muttered.

The warmth fled when Astrid opened the door; whatever peace she’d found in sleep went with it. She pulled the scarf over her mouth and bent her head to step into the wind. The storm had strengthened while she slept. Stormfly hugged close to Astrid and held her wings out, for balance and to shield Astrid from the worst of the hail. Astrid’s boots crunched, breaking through the sheet of ice as she slogged on through the snow.

At the path, recognizable only because the snow piled on it stood a half-inch lower than the surrounding snow, she paused. Astrid looked to the mountain. Berk was dark, all its shutters closed and its lights kept safely within, out of reach of the storm. She scratched Stormfly’s chin. How far she’d flown, Astrid thought, and she had done it because Astrid had asked her to do it. Restless as Stormfly was to move, her shoulders still trembled at intervals. Control came at a cost. Astrid knew that.

“Come on,” Astrid said. She rubbed Stormfly’s plated breast. “Let’s go.”

She was trembling too when they came to the chief’s house. Halfway down the winding path, Stormfly had warbled and then nudged Astrid on her arse. Astrid started and glanced at Stormfly. She smiled.

“Thanks,” she said, and she got on Stormfly’s back. The muscles in her legs flared as she sat; the ones running along the inside of her thighs felt like threads pulled too tight. Stormfly stretched her wings. She took a crouching step. Then Astrid knocked her knuckles on Stormfly’s crest. 

“No flying,” Astrid said. “We’re going to walk to the chief’s house. Okay?”

She hung forward and to the side, so that she could flash Stormfly the hand signal for _slow and easy_ : a flat hand that rolled as though she’d set it on a wave. Visibility was too poor for flight. In her tensed and aching legs she felt the minute shivering gathered in the thick musculature at Stormfly’s shoulders; the shivering of someone overworked. She was warm, though. As Stormfly forged into the snow, Astrid sank behind her crest. She laid her cheek to Stormfly’s nape. The scales were smooth. Small hailstones pinged off the crest. One caught Astrid on the knee. She clasped her legs more tightly about Stormfly. The furnace heat eased the soft throbbing in Astrid’s knee. Slowly, the taut muscles in her thighs eased too. 

She left it to Stormfly to navigate them through the dizzying storm, the darkness that gripped Berk, the thick and icy drifts of snow. Hailstones cracked the ice. Small pops everywhere, like the crackling of sparks in a strong fire without the light or the comfort. Yet she had comfort, in the surety that she could leave this thing to Stormfly. She had no sisters, no brothers. Fishlegs was a middle son, and Snotlout had his six older sisters and the baby brother. Ruffnut and Tuffnut had their younger brothers, twins themselves, and a sister, a very small child still in babe’s cloths. Astrid had cousins, many, most of them loved. Sillawit, she thought, was closest to a sister; and she felt for Stormfly a thing like that, or as she might toward a daughter. Something other than either, some other feeling rooted in that common amenity, that act of faith where the bond was true. To love was to protect, and to be protected. 

Stormfly’s swaying gait exaggerated as she made her way up the hill to Stoick’s home, set apart from the others yet fashioned in the same style. A father to all. Astrid slithered from Stormfly’s back. Some thin light spilled out from beneath the door. The chief had not yet sealed that crack against the cold. Upon knocking at the door, she waited. Astrid crossed her arms. Her shoulders hunched. Stormfly yawped and waggled, flinging hailstones off her wings, her crest. Astrid knocked again, and then she hauled the door open.

Hot air blasted her face. She flinched from it. Stormfly crowded her.

The chief was not there. Gobber, sitting on a too small by the central hearth where he was stirring a pot, sighed to see her. The fire spat merrily, but huge shadows lined the far wall. Not shadows, she thought: Toothless. He had settled alongside the bed, with his chin resting on it. His eyes opened; lidded, he saw Astrid. The small fins at the top of his head perked.

“I should have known you wouldn’t stay away,” said Gobber. Artfully he dashed the ladle on the pot’s lip, shaking some creamy soup from the bowl. He hooked the end of the ladle on the metal rack set beside the fire. “Well, then. It’s the lad you’re wanting to see now, isn’t it? Though I would not say no to a guest of my own.”

“How is he?”

“See for yourself.” 

Gobber gestured her toward Stoick’s bed. Someone had covered Hiccup in a mound of furs, the hair faced down so as to trap the heat. She wondered if Stoick had tried to tuck the edges in for Hiccup. Astrid stayed at the foot of the bed for two heartbeats, three. Toothless exhaled. Then she covered the little distance. Lightly she perched on the edge of the bed and rested her hand on the furs and leaned, her shoulder braced, to look at his face. He breathed softly. Small hoarse breaths; his mouth was open. He’d creases on the cheek turned to her and the other snugged against the pillow. He’d turned recently.

“He’s slept most of the day,” Gobber said. He closed the door and shooed Stormfly to the fire. “You did the same too, I trust.”

Breathing, she thought. She lifted her hand and then lowered it, a fist, and then again she raised it, her fingers uncurling. She touched Hiccup’s chest. He breathed in and then out. A minute rise; a minute fall. The fever was high in his cheeks. His hair was sweat-slick. 

“You’re just in time,” Gobber went on. “He’s medicine to take, and I think he might enjoy the healing touch of a particular woman over my cracked hand.”

Astrid shot him a look. He grinned, unrepentant, and sat by the fire.

“Do you know what it is?”

“Unpleasant,” he said, and he stuck his tongue out. “Not that I drank any of it myself, but the smell… Aye, there’s no mistaking it. It’s medicinal.”

“What he has,” she said, exasperated. 

Gobber lifted the ladle. “Just a cold, though not a pleasant one. We’re to keep it out of his lungs. The medicine is for that leg of his. The mad woman,” he said, in that begrudging affectionate way he had with Gothi, “gave him a nip of it and he was out like a light. I’d ask for some myself but then that smell.” He shuddered. 

Astrid studied Hiccup. This was a private thing, she thought. She moved the furs aside, exposing his leg. Toothless raised his head. His nostrils quivered; he was smelling at the air. Hiccup’s legs were bare under the furs. For a single unbearable moment she only looked at it. Then, so slightly she hardly felt it, she brushed her fingertips along the coarse thread with which someone had sewn the skin together. She left her hand there, her palm to the stump. The skin there warm from Toothless and the furs and fever, and slick from the salve rubbed into it. Hiccup sighed in his sleep, and his leg shifted out from under her hand. She dropped the furs then neatened them over his legs. She tucked them beneath his thighs, his foot.

“Frostbite,” she said. 

“He woke some when Gothi cut it out.” Gobber concentrated on the fire. His mouth curled; a frown. “Nearly lost a few of his fingers too.”

With a hot knife Gothi had dug into his leg and pulled from it each patch of dead flesh. Gangrene could take more than a leg. A patchwork web of tiny stitches littered his stump. Toothless watched as Astrid tugged the furs smooth over Hiccup. Even with the burgeoning rot excised infection might still set in. He was already sick.

Astrid cleared her throat. “Where’s the medicine?”

Gobber filled a bowl with the thick soup he’d thrown together, and this he gave to her along with a wooden vial, simple instructions notched on its side. The bowl was beautifully made, carved in relief with a long dragon wrapped about the rim and consuming its own crookedly shaped tail. The smell of the soup drifted, a hearty fragrance, not rich but sustaining.

“Out of that,” said Gobber, as Stormfly sniffed at the pot with interest.

Astrid said, “Stormfly. No,” and Stormfly turned from the pot to sulk.

Holding the bowl in her lap, and the vial beside the bowl, she shook Hiccup’s shoulder. He murmured. His face pinched. He scowled, and the long lines that framed his mouth at that were startlingly like his father. Then those lines eased, and the shadow in his brow went on its way. His neck arched; he buried his face in the pillow. Seated on the bed with the evening’s meal warming her hand and the seat of her thighs, Astrid felt her chest constrict. 

Gobber hummed tunelessly. The ladle clinked as he stirred, out of rhythm. He was unworried, or he did well at feigning it. She knew him to be a wit, joking even in the face of probable death, and so his good humor was not to be trusted. Yet it was true, wasn’t it, that babes survived the cough? Hale youths might fight a sickness of the lungs. Fleetly she trickled her fingernails across his sweltry cheek. He had lost most of the calf two years ago and lived. A man’s health could be broken, she thought. She stroked his jaw. Who could promise a life? 

She checked for Gobber. He was chatting with Stormfly. 

“Oh, yes, my dear mum always wanted me to be a chef, but I had my heart set on the forge. More sharp things to lose what limbs I had left to, you see. A boy has dreams of being the first all-peg Viking. Of course, there were some difficulties realizing that dream…”

Astrid brushed the bangs from her eyes. She tucked the hair behind her ear. Three thin hanks slipped across her brow again, and when she bent to kiss Hiccup so very lightly on the side of his nose, those lengths of pale hair curled back upon his cheek. His nose wrinkled. She said, “Wake up,” and shook his shoulder again. His eyelashes fluttered. He was frowning.

“Go away,” he grumbled. “Or I’ll unleash… dragon. Fury.” He rubbed his nose in the pillow.

Gobber clanged the ladle on the pot. She glanced. As he made to sip most elegantly from the ladle, Gobber winked at her. Astrid reddened, and she thumped Hiccup on the shoulder.

“Ow!” he said, flinching. “ _What!_ What do you _want_ —” He squinted at Astrid, and as he did so the address at the end dovetailed into a puzzled “Da-astrid?”

“Dad?” Astrid said, arching her eyebrows. Of all things, she thought she might laugh. “You thought I was your Dad?”

“I hope not for that bit a moment ago,” Gobber said in an aside to Stormfly.

Astrid whirled. He’d brought the ladle to his lips again, his little finger finely raised. All innocence and grace and soup-y mustache, Gobber widened his blue eyes and slurped. As a teacher, her elder, and Hiccup’s mentor, he was owed respect. Astrid showed him a fist, and Gobber laughed into his soup.

Hiccup had scrunched all his face into a powerful squint. His hair was a sticky mess. Rising on his elbows, the furs sliding from his shoulders, he scratched at the far side of his chest with his left hand. The second and third fingers of that hand were wrapped in separate poultices. He husked, “I did?” and then he looked at his bandaged fingers. Slowly he wiggled them, just the tips, like vegetation in the water. Then he looked at Astrid over his hand. There was such a sweetness in his gaze, a confusion that was yet calm, against which she had no fortified walls, no armaments. He looked at her as if uncertain she was there.

None of the last day was a dream. She could not imagine it to be such. Still a dreaminess clung to it, as of a happy ending not to be believed. He had not died. Swollen, dark bruises marked his throat. She wanted to laugh, and to put her arms around him, and to hold him to her; but then she would spill the hot soup all over them both and possibly Toothless, besides.

She ducked her head and turned up her face, to peer at him through her bangs.

“Did you _want_ me to be your dad?”

“Definitely not,” he said. He was squinting again. “That would be—alarming, for a number of reasons. Just, really, a lot of reasons. Thank you for not being my dad.”

“If I’d known it would make you so happy,” she said, “I’d have tried not being your father earlier.”

“That sounds…” He paused. His brow furrowed. “Wait. Why are you in my bed?” He shot upright, his knees rising, and then he groaned, collapsing on his side. He touched his left knee.

As she made to set the bowl on the bedside table, Hiccup whispered, panicked, “Astrid, why are you in my bed? With me?”

“Who else would I be in your bed with?” she asked, outraged, before she’d time enough to think it through. Her face went hot. She ought to have stayed in her own bed till she’d got her head on right. “And it isn’t your bed; this is your dad’s bed.”

He stared at her. The fire had spread to her ears. She shoved at her hair so that her long bangs obscured her eyes and perhaps some of the red in her cheeks, and she bent to pull back the furs to look at his leg.

“What—how is that—why are you in my dad’s bed?”

Gobber coughed terrifically. Hiccup snapped around, and in his violence accidentally kicked Toothless with his stump. 

“And where did you learn that kind of language!” said Gobber, when Hiccup had finished.

“You,” Hiccup gasped. “You really need to watch what you say when you hammer your thumb. Why does my leg—” Then he squeaked.

She batted his hands away. “Stop fussing with it. Let me take a look.”

“At what?” he said, trying again to throw the furs back over his legs. “My—my bony knees? My scrawny thighs? Look, this is all a little, a little sudden, you’re in my bed—my dad’s bed—Gobber’s—I’m not wearing any trousers! Astrid! Gobber! Make her stop!”

“O, Loki,” Gobber intoned, as he crossed to Stoick’s bed, “whatever did I do to you that I should be made to nanny every boneheaded teenager on this rock? Here, stop scandalizing the lad. You might want some snow,” he added to Astrid. “You look flushed.”

She glared at him and shook her bangs back. Hiccup said, “What—now you’re mad, too? Astrid—”

“Are you sure he needs another dose?” She nodded toward the corked vial, rolling on its side on the table. It butted against the bowl and stilled.

“Thrice a day, and no mistakes about it,” said Gobber. He sat on the other side of the bed, his arse riding up in Toothless’ face. Toothless recoiled and hissed, but Gobber paid him no mind. He’d taken the furs in his hand and yanked them aside.

“Gobber!” Hiccup took a swing at Gobber with the pillow. He upended himself instead, and Astrid lurched forward to catch him on her shoulder. His breath caught on her too. His head had dropped. Perspiration dotted his temples.

“Don’t worry,” Gobber told Hiccup, “I’ll make sure Astrid doesn’t sneak any peeks at your northerlies.”

Displaced, Toothless clambered over the footboard. Too large by far for even so vast a bed as that used by Stoick, likewise vast, he made do with getting only his front legs and his head up there. His tail flashed, raised as if to say hello and then vanishing behind the footboard again.

“You don’t have to make everything a joke,” Astrid said.

“Who’s telling jokes?” asked Gobber mildly. “You two are in need of a chaperone, and the dragons aren’t exactly models of moral behavior.”

He palmed Hiccup’s leg. Hiccup jerked against Astrid. She slung her arm around his back; her hand rested beneath his arm, her fingers just grazing his thin chest. Wriggling, Toothless sniffed again at Hiccup’s leg, exposed to the air. Gobber was steadily forcing the knee out straight. He lifted the stump. The skin was pink, hotly so around the stitches.

Hiccup said, “How did…” His bandaged fingers grazed her knuckles.

“You had frostbite,” she said to his ear, near her lips. 

“Gave us all quite the scare with your dramatics.” His hand was huge and rough, scarred where soot had got into small cuts. As steadily as he had pulled Hiccup’s leg flat, he palpitated the stump: checking the stitches. Testing for pus.

“Not entirely convinced dramatics is the best way to cover—that,” Hiccup said. His fingers fluttered, half-gesturing, then his hand returned to hers. The cloth bandages rasped.

“Well,” said Gobber. He laid Hiccup’s leg against the sheets, very gently, and then flipped the furs over his knees, his ankle. “I don’t think you’re at risk for losing the rest of the leg tonight.”

“Don’t you think you should check on that pot?” Astrid said. “Before the soup burns?”

He rose, making a show of groaning. “Oh, aye. Though how much soup’s left…” In passing, he patted Astrid’s shoulder, sending her swaying with Hiccup. “My bedside manner’s not so pleasant as yours.”

The color was in her cheeks. She fussed with her bangs, scattering them, and then she turned to Hiccup, who was resting against her as though he meant to sleep again. He was holding her hand too, not tightly but with a certain firmness, like a man in the water holding on to a line. Not that desperate, she thought.

She followed the angle of his head. He was looking at the shape of his truncated leg, beneath the furs. The fire had its shadows, and one long, lean such shadow reached from the wall to curl upon the bed as a cat. They both of them saw something else in that, some thing other than the way the fur sloped over the stump.

“Do you remember now?” she asked him softly.

He said, “Yeah. I remember,” in a voice made sore by Dagur’s hands.

Toothless fetched his tail up, hanging it over the footboard. His wings were spread flatly about him, a night’s cloak for a king. He grumped, guttural, at Hiccup.

“I’m all right,” Hiccup said. He leaned off Astrid’s shoulder. His knee bent beneath the furs; he hoisted the leg up, to cross it over the other. He winced but held the position. “See? It’s the same crippled stump we’ve all come to know and love. And what a stump!”

“Put your leg down,” Astrid said, fondness a thing puffing in her chest, “and sit up. You need to eat before you have any more of Gothi’s medicine.”

He settled. His shoulder fitted against hers, her arm behind his. She withdrew her hand from his side, leaving it halfway down his back as she turned to the table. 

“Look at this!” said Gobber by the fire. “I leave you alone for five seconds and you’ve gobbled it all.”

Stormfly peeped at Astrid. She’d soup dripping from her chin. 

Astrid said, “ _Storm_ fly…” and Stormfly turned her apologetic act on Gobber rather than Astrid. He was no more impressed by her skills as a thespian.

“Oh,” said Hiccup. “Did you… I just really don’t want you to have had to go to all the trouble of cooking, for me, when we just got back, and, uh…”

She straightened, holding the bowl in her hands. He froze. His eyes dropped. He opened his mouth then his front teeth clicked together. Lips still pursed out. He glanced to the side.

“Of course I made it,” she said. She pushed the bowl at him; he took it. “You know I’m worried about you. That’s why I stirred in some extra yak’s milk. Some herbs I found in the kitchen. Herbs are good for you.”

She uncorked the medicine vial while he stared into the bowl at the soup, his skin so white beneath his sweat. Sniffing at the vial, she blanched, and she sloshed in the ten drops prescribed on the side of the vial. 

“Go ahead,” she said. “Eat some. Oh—” She passed on the spoon, forgot on the table. “Here. This might help some. It’s like my mother always says, suffering makes you stronger.”

He stirred the soup half-heartedly. “Oh, well, if that’s the case, then I should be bulking up any day. Muscles on top of muscles. I’ll probably be so big you’ll have to start riding me,” he said to Toothless, who was, bit by bit, inching entirely onto the bed. His nostrils flared; he smelled at the soup with great interest.

“Eat,” said Astrid.

Hiccup looked up at her through his bangs. He looked at Toothless. He looked at the wood carving of Odin that sat by the door, and then he looked again at the soup. He swallowed. Astrid crossed her arms and waited. Toothless smacked his lips and hooked his right back paw on the footboard. His left wing blanketed Hiccup’s legs. Hiccup slumped.

“Thank you, Astrid,” he said miserably, and he took the spoon in hand. He squeezed his eyes shut, that he wouldn’t see it, and popped the spoonful of soup into his mouth. All of him had braced. All of him started. He choked.

Astrid whacked him helpfully on the back.

“That’s—I mean,” he said, swallowing, “that’s actually—well, aside from whatever Gothi had you put in that—”

“Snotlout’s socks,” she suggested.

“That was actually really—really good.”

“Thanks,” Astrid said, smiling. “But Gobber made it. So you should tell him that.”

“Hey-o,” said Gobber. He saluted rakishly, his wood hand at his brow.

Hiccup was left blinking owlishly. “So,” he said, “you just…”

“Eat the rest of the soup.”

He furrowed. “What could you possibly have gained from that?”

“You haven’t eaten anything in a day,” Astrid said, shooing Toothless so she might straighten the furs. He crab-walked along the footboard and then refused to budge further, piled upon himself like a ribbon.

Hiccup sighed and did as she told him. “You could be a little more sensitive to my situation,” he said around the next spoonful.

Astrid gently flicked Toothless’ ear flap. She glanced at Hiccup: the feverish cast to his skin, the frown wrinkling his thin lips. The bandages wound about his fingers, clasping the bowl. Three fingers of the left hand were bound, too, and he held the spoon with particular care.

“I am,” she said.

His eyes lifted. She cleared her throat. 

“All of it,” she said. “You have to eat all of it. No sneaking the dregs to Toothless.”

Toothless huffed. As if he’d be satisfied with just the dregs.

Hiccup ate. Already the energy he’d found in waking had begun to dwindle. His eyelids were heavy and growing heavier. Sweat at his ears. His leg gouged and sewn and rubbed with a foul-smelling salve to chase away infection. Her heart swollen and cruel, and she could not ask him this, if it bothered him to know she had done what she did and that she had done it for him. Gobber was singing to Stormfly. What did she fear? She let it lie, and in her stomach it roiled.

His hand shook. He set the spoon down and held the bowl in his palms and tipped it so that he drank directly from it. His eyelashes were like burnt copper. When he lowered the bowl, she took it from his loosening grip. The spoon rattled along the curve.

“Thank you,” Hiccup said. His voice so rough. Ink dark bruises on his throat, in the fashion of Dagur’s hands; a final imprint. “Astrid.”

“You don’t have to thank me,” she said.

“I do.”

She was shaking her head. Her fingers had knotted in the furs. He grazed her hand with his fingertips.

“I do,” he said again. “You saved me.”

Astrid looked at their hands. As she looked, he lifted his hand. His fingers half-furled. The bandages thick. He reached. Her hair hung between them, over her eyes, and she thought he meant to touch her jaw. Was the blood still there? She’d cleaned her face before she’d left, and in the wash water she had picked out but the faintest of red spaces, the blood flaked away. His fingertips hovered, short of her skin. The stink of the poultice was thick in her nose. Then he lowered his hand, and she was watching the place where he had been, near to her and then not at all.

Hiccup slipped to the pillow. He was near to sleep, she thought. Her heart still cruel. She brushed her cheek, skin dry, chapped.

“Just don’t scare me again,” Astrid said. 

“You know me,” Hiccup said. His eyes drifted. He was smiling, and she wanted to touch his lips. “Always running to find trouble. Must be all those manly Viking urges.”

“Well,” Astrid said, “then you just have to remember to take me with you next time.”

He said, “I will,” and then he slept.

She stayed a while, watching him as he slept. His breathing evened. She swept his sweat-sticky hair from his brow. The heel of her palm grazed his cheek. She drew her hand from him. Toothless crept along the bed to settle beside Hiccup. His wing engulfed Hiccup. She rubbed the sweat off her hand on her trouser leg. Then she took the bowl and the spoon and the vial from the table, and she stood, and she gave them to Gobber.

“Come again soon,” said Gobber. He grasped the little vial. “He’ll be looking for you when he wakes up.” 

A lie, she thought; but a lie kindly meant. And did she want Hiccup to look for her? To look for her and then to remember.

“I’ll try,” Astrid said.

She clapped her hands, and Stormfly rose, stretching her wings. Astrid pulled her gloves back on. The chief’s house was toasty, cozy with Toothless on guard and Gobber tending to the hearth and Sureshot, Hiccup’s Terror, somewhere about; and Hiccup, sleeping. Breathing as he slept. She pushed the door open. Sleet again. Turning her face to the cold, iced ground, she set back out into winter. Stormfly went with her. They left the chief’s house, high on the hill and looking over the village’s heart, frozen now as the first blizzard of the season settled into its bones; and Berk gathered about that heart like children around a fire, gathered together for warmth, his head tucked to her shoulder and their breath mingling whitely before them like a promise she had yet to make. He was alive, she thought. Any sacrifice was worth that. No greater mercy than the growing softness in his features as he slipped from wakefulness to slumber. What she’d done she had done because it was necessary. 

The sleet pecked at her cheeks. She hoisted the collar up, and then Stormfly hoisted her up. Ghostly traces remained of Stormfly’s footprints, from her climb up the path to the chief’s house, and it was these footprints they followed, like slipping backwards through the hours of the day; like such a thing could be done. He was alive. 

All through the night the storm raged. All through the week. Here was winter come, and winter did stay. In all Berk’s sturdy homes, houses humble and grand alike, the winter fires woke; and with the trailing smoke rose quick prayers to the gods, to be delivered safely from this tyrant and to spring, and the wind took these prayers as it took the smoke so that only the fires remained, and the heat they gave, and the light they made, and the solace they offered to those whom winter had chilled. 

Yet as Astrid knelt by the hearth and Stormfly settled at her back, and Fastfoot stretched pleasurably before the flames, she thought she had found more warmth in the long night on that unnamed island, his arm about her waist and her cheek on his head, and their knees pressed together. The smoke running out to sea. Her face near to numb. The hour endless and dark and unkind. The specter of death in sleep looming just outside the ring they’d all made with their dragons. No time at all to think of what had been done. She’d held him and that had been enough.

She hid her face in her arms and leaned back into Stormfly’s huge side. Stormfly cooed and tucked her wing about Astrid. Fastfoot’s purring a constant, throaty rattle. Then Astrid, too, slept, and whatever she dreamed she had forgot by morning, though she’d an ache in her chest as if she had dreamed of her father, or of Old Dog, or Hiccup’s eyes as he had seen her standing there in the doorway to the hold. How he’d looked at her. How he hadn’t, as he left her with the dragon. In the morning she stirred. Fastfoot snored on her back. She watched the fire, stoked again by her mother when she’d come in, how it twisted and ate itself. She wanted to roll over and close her eyes and sleep again.

Morning. Work to be done. In the bitter chill, she got up to prepare for the new day.


End file.
